How Much SEO Weight Does Link Building Carry In 2010?

Guest Post by Vic Smith from SEOever |

Before the major search engines like Google became so finicky, the primary SEO strategy was to “build more links”. At that time, you could build a variety of links that were backed by the original standard of thought – the more links the better.

Just a few years ago I was in such a rush to comment on blogs and forums, dozens of times per day that hundreds even thousands of links were built in a manner of months! During that period, backlinks were the deciding ranking factor, and their impact on search engines was overwhelming. Quantity!

In today’s link building, that train of thought is considered outdated. Google currently decreases the power that various links have on your ranking. Additionally, backlinks building is not anymore considered important, as most websites have lost their power, trust and authority through Search Engines’ manipulative tendencies of their webmasters.

Quality link building is still possible, but it is done through a new qualitative method, which happens to be the newest and most dominant trend, not quantity but quality.

Greater weight is being placed on authority, which is the confidence that others have in your website being high quality and offering no spam.

The trust issue may not be easily or exactly understood and is also quite subjective making impossible to measure the authority of a website at the time of link building – you can only see in time if a link is giving you in return PR juice, traffic or even both.

Today, Google’s algorithm is adjusted manually (this is what I believe, is just a personal opinion though) to place a vote of trust on websites and to utilize these sites as the standard, in order to locate useful pages instead of spam. With this said, in the SEO world today trust is much more paramount than page rank. If until today we were using as guides the PR, it seams that the Page Rank is not anymore something to trust but website authority. Sadly for SEOs, the authority, as we speak, is hard to determine when doing link building.

Although many links failed to maintain the value they once had, link building is still an important factor in deciding rank. Links will remain the foremost scalable SEO parameter aside from the website’s content. The popularity of a website, as well as the trust from a search engine, originates via links.

Links are a great way for search engines to simplify the status and relevance of a website. There are no current alternatives to links, even though some search engines are looking into possible future alternatives, such as user behavior and whatnot.

Website importance is parallel to having a natural, varied, and well-formed link profile. This profile will include pertinent links from academic sites, authority sites, forums, blogs, fan pages, discussion groups, consumer information, directories, and review sites, just to name a few. It will also include an assortment of links, such as “nofollow” and “do follow” links, to the same page, with different anchor texts. These include long tail keywords, deep links to existing pages that use longer tail anchor text, and genuine natural links.

The best piece of advice is to be sure that the link profile occurs at an even pace, or a natural pace, preferably without large spikes and long interruptions.

No Follow – Google changed the way in which the rel=”nofollow” attribute of links being used in 2009. Prior to this time, “nofollow” stopped page rank from following a link. “Nofollow” conserved the page ranking (PR) for the linking site known as PR-sculpting. Now, however, things have changed to where the “nofollow” will stop the page rank from following; but the amount of PR that would have followed is not thrown out.

In other words “nofollow” does not stop anymore search bots from following but in the same time, will block the PR delivery.

Vic Smith is a seasoned Web Developer and a SEO enthusiast, writing about the ways any website can achieve a good place in search results. He owns a Toronto SEO business addressing to small and family businesses and helping them to rank higher in Google SERPs.