Link building is a strategy to improve a website's ranking in search engine results by increasing high-quality backlinks. Various methods include exchanging links, guest posting, and using advertorials, though some practices like buying links or creating unnatural link patterns may lead to penalties from search engines. Caution is advised to maintain a natural backlink profile and avoid tactics that could be considered manipulative.

1. WHY DO LINK BUILDING
Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing
to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website
ranking highly in search engine results. Link building is also a
proven marketing tactic for increasing brand awareness

2. KIND OF LINK BUILDING
1. Link for Link
2. Money for Links
3. Goods or Services for Links
4. Guest Posting
5. Automatically Generated Links
6. Widget Links
7. Advertorials
8. Text Advertisements that pass PageRank
9. Articles & Commercial Anchor Text
10. Web-Directory Links
11. Footer links
12. Sitewide links
13. Blogroll links

3. KIND OF LINK BUILDING
14. Forum & Blog Comments
15. 100% Do-Follow Links
16. Anchor Text Over-optimization
17. Geographically Irrelevant Links
18. Contextually Irrelevant Links
19. Link Velocity Spikes
20. Article Directories
21. Link Networks
22. Press Releases
23. Bookmark Sites
24. Resource Pages
25. Sites that Sell Links
26. Social Profile Links

4. LINK FOR LINK
I’m referring here at
exchange methods of
link building. For
example, if you’re a
car sales rep and you
have links to several
car service centers
and insurance
brokers around your
area and they link
back to you, it will
probably won’t raise
any suspicions.

5. MONEY FOR LINKS
Offering money in
exchange for links or
content that
incorporate links is
one of the most
obvious methods to
acquire unnatural
links. One form of
practice that is not
that pronounced is
obtaining links to
your site after
offering a donation

6. GOODS OR SERVICES FOR
LINKS
If the method of
exchanging money
for links is straight
forwarded, there’s a
thin line regarding
bartering between
services or goods
and links

7. GUEST POSTING
Recently added in
the not-so-select
group of unnatural
link tactics, guest
posting may be
harmful for your
website if it’s done
improperly

8. AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED
LINKS
It’s sounds like a
sweet deal when
someone offers to
build bulks of links
over night on certain
targeted keywords

9. WIDGET LINKS
The person that
created the plugin
has the possibility to
inject links on all the
sites that have that
respective plugin
installed.

10. ADVERTORIALS
Advertorials are articles
that are published by
sites as a form of
advertisement. Google
may consider this as a
form of paid link
tactic IF the links that
point back to your site
are not tagged as
nofollow

11. TEXT ADVERTISEMENTS THAT
PASS PAGERANK
Same story as in the
case of advertorials.
They may be considered
as unnatural when they
are left as do-follow and
they directly influence
the site’s ranking in the
search engine

12. ARTICLES & COMMERCIAL
ANCHOR TEXT
It’s a good thing that
people write about your
product or service and
link back to your
website. As long as a
person creates links in a
natural way

13. WEB-DIRECTORY LINKS
People used to abuse
these type of sites by
placing links on
hundreds of web
directories. If your site’s
link portfolio has mostly
these kind of links you
might get the unwanted
attention of the
Webspam Team

14. FOOTER LINKS
A tactic popularized by
web design agencies &
used by them to
increases their site’s
visibility in the search
engines, was to put links
in the footer of their
client’s pages with the
wording such as
“Designed by”

15. SITEWIDE LINKS
When you create
sitewide links GoogleBot
is going to see the link
on almost every page of
the website. One or two
site-wide links won’t
raise any suspicion but if
you’re going to abuse
this feature, most likely
Google will place it
under the unnatural
links category

16. BLOGROLL LINKS
A technique that’s been
around and abused just
as long as the one with
the web-directory links.
There’s nothing harmful
if you have 1-2 links and
they are placed on
relevant blogs

17. FORUM & BLOG COMMENTS
Comments on forums
and blogs are often used
as a way to get yourself
known in the
community. You relate to
other people’s content
and you create a
conversation.

18. 100% DO-FOLLOW LINKS
It’s not likely for a site to
have 100% do-follow
links. Usually, a natural
backlink profile has a
homogenous mix of do-
follow and nofollow.
People often create
comments on do-follow
blogs as a way of link
building

19. ANCHOR TEXT OVER-
OPTIMIZATION
The anchor text keyword
cloud must be diverse in
order to look natural. If
you don’t want Google
to penalize your website
we suggest staying as far
away as possible from
over-optimized anchor
text structures

20. GEOGRAPHICALLY IRRELEVANT
LINKS
Let’s say you have a local
business that sells ice
cream in Miami. It’s
highly doubtable that
you’re being naturally
linked to web-directories
localized in Croatia.
When Google
encounters a lot of links
that have this
discrepancy

21. LINK VELOCITY SPIKES
When you have big
velocity spikes, either
daily or monthly,
compared with your
overall website history
averages, it means
either something
important happened in
that period, or your site
is trying to manipulate
the site’s ranking in the
search engines.

22. ARTICLE DIRECTORIES
Article directories such
as EzineArticles are a
source of low quality
articles. Their only
purpose on the internet
is to generate pages with
do-follow links in their
content. Because this
type of link building
strategies can be
automated

23. LINK NETWORKS
Private blog networks (in
general) are sites that
are using different IP
addresses which are
owned by the same
person, who controls
them and posts articles
with do-follow links at
his own discretion

24. PRESS RELEASES
An abused strategy
which gives webmasters
the opportunity to use
sites like Prweb to
publish press releases
(with the same content)
on hundreds of sites, in
order to create do-
follow links back to them

25. BOOKMARK SITES
These type of sites allow
users to place personal
bookmarks. If you have
an abundance of links
coming from this area, it
means you’re using
these sites as a link
building strategy and
you want to influence
your site’s rankings in
the search engines.

26. RESOURCE PAGES
An ancient form of link
building strategy , which
refers to certain pages
from the site that look
like “/links.html”, filled
with links to a variety of
non-related pages

27. SITES THAT SELL LINKS
On these type of
websites, if you stop
paying, your link will be
removed from the site,
and in it’s place will be
another one. Google
looks at sites that are
constantly creating and
deleting links from their
site, and may figure out
if someone is selling
links

28. SOCIAL PROFILE LINKS
If you create 100
accounts on different
social networks, and
they all link to your
website, it’s may be sign
of an unnatural link
tactic. From what
Google declares, these
links are used only for
indexing, so they won’t
have a direct influence
over the results order in
the search engine.