We are asked questions like “What is Link Building” or “Why is Link Building Important”?

The answers to these questions are very similar yet very different.

To start with let’s look at what link building is and what link building isn’t.

You see, we’ve been researching link building for many years and have watched the value of link building change and morph from something which is purely ranking related to something which is more tactical in nature.

You see, up until recently, Google used linking as a ranking factor.  In fact they probably still use linking as a factor however its value as one of those many hundreds of linking factors has diminished.

But what is link building?

Wait a sec.  We need to take a step back and answer the question “What is Link Building?”

Link building is the process of requesting links back to your site from other websites.

Links are the way everything navigates the web.  When you do a search on a search engine and click on a result you are really clicking on a link to that website.  When you are on a website and click a button or image to go to another page you are clicking on a hyperlink to that page.  Link is short for hyperlink.  It’s the way the web is navigated.

Google figured out a while ago that links were important indicators to a web page’s worth online.  The pages with the most pages tended to garner the most links and therefore were considered to be more important.

Webmasters and site owners soon figured this out so began to develop ways to exploit this to their benefit.  As such, Google refined their linking algorithms (and continue to do so today) to help ensure the sites you see on search results today are there because they should be, and not because some site owner “gamed the system”.

So why is link building still important?

As you might wonder, if Google has essentially devalued links, then why would you continue to offer link building?  Simple, while we feel links don’t directly influence rankings, we feel there is still a value to them.

We believe Google has shifted the value of links from a ranking factor to an indexing factor.  In other words, the links aren’t used to determine the “value” of your site online, however they are used to help google decide if you should be in their index in the first place.

We have found that sites with fewer links tend to rank lower than other sites not because they are worth less, but because less of their pages are being indexed by Google.  It’s just that simple.

Now you should see why link building is important.

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