Link Building in 2024

[JoelR]

Inspired by SearchEngineLand: https://searchengineland.com/link-building-win-fail-430176

"As search engines have become more sophisticated, the strategies for effective link building have evolved. 

In 2024, the focus has shifted from quantity to quality, with a greater emphasis on acquiring high-quality, authoritative backlinks from relevant and trustworthy sources. 

This article explores 12 key dos and don’ts for successful link building, highlighting common mistakes to avoid and effective SEO strategies to employ.

Fails: Common link building mistakes

1. Don’t: prioritize quantity over quality

More is not better. Better is better. A focus purely on volume is detrimental to your rankings and credibility. 

Remember, Google values the quality and relevance of backlinks over sheer volume. One high-quality backlink from an authoritative website has more impact on rankings than multiple low-quality backlinks. 

Be sure to focus on building relationships with authoritative and relevant sources for impactful link acquisition.

2. Don’t: Neglect the relevance of linked content

While acquiring backlinks from any source may be tempting, this harms your website’s credibility and rankings. 

Building links from irrelevant websites can undermine your site’s credibility and rankings. For example, if you operate a law firm, acquiring backlinks from technology blogs or travel websites may not be as beneficial as securing links from legal publications or industry-specific directories. 

3. Don’t: Publish thin content

In the quest for more content, many are tempted to publish thin or low-quality pieces to drive frequency over quality. 

Google and other search engines won’t reward content that isn’t valuable to visitors. 

Instead, be sure to focus on creating high-quality, informative, and engaging content that addresses the needs and interests of your audience. 

The quality of your content is more impactful for your visitors and rankings over poor content publishing more frequently. 

Remember to conduct thorough research, provide unique insights, and ensure your content is original, well-written and well-structured. Use surveys to gather your own data and provide insights that are easy to digest or provide a different point of view."

[Nomad]

Forum posting is one of the best ways to build links. Most forums allow you to share links on your profile page, timeliness and signature. However, you need to make sure that you use forums on related niche and you are also active. You also need to be mindful about posting links inside posts. Most forums do not allow this.

[Kane]

Forum posting certainly helps in link building. However, I believe publishing articles on article sites is a better way to build links. That's because your article can get search traffic,  whereas forum posts will rarely get search traffic.

[Maria]

The main purpose of link building is to improve search engine ranking and get traffic. This will happen only when you are building links on high traffic and high ranking websites on your niche. For instance, if you are running a sports niche website, you will benefit only when you build links on sports niche website, and the website ranks higher on search engine result page.

[Nomad]

On 3/11/2024 at 4:46 PM, Maria said:

The main purpose of link building is to improve search engine ranking and get traffic. This will happen only when you are building links on high traffic and high ranking websites on your niche. For instance, if you are running a sports niche website, you will benefit only when you build links on sports niche website, and the website ranks higher on search engine result page.

Totally agree. For example, you and submit links in this community, however, you will benefit only when your links are related to community management and digital marketing and your site ranks lower than this site. Submitting links on random sites doesn't actually help.