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Everything You Should Know About Link Building Before 2020

Knowing about link building is vital if you do business online.

Some people make the mistake of associating search engine optimisation simply with keywords. Link building is another major factor that can give your search engine rankings a boost.

In this blog post, we’re going to discuss everything you need to know about link building before 2020 rolls around. This includes definitions, common strategies, and relevant Google updates.

Let’s get started.

What is Link Building?

Link building is the act of using strategies to generate links from one web page to another.

Links are important for two main reasons.

First, they tell the search engines how great your content is. The more links you have, the better your content looks to search engines.

Links become even more valuable if they’re from a website that’s considered an authority in your field. The more traffic a website gets, the more valuable a link from it becomes.

Next, they show the search engines how your website is organised. You may not realise it, but each link on your website is important. Each link–from the footer to the navigation bar links–help determine if a webpage will even appear in search engine results.

Let us say that you worked hard on a particular product page on your business website. You revise the copy over and over, and you hired a professional photographer to take product photos.

However, you forgot to add a link to the said product page on your navigation bar. In fact, none of the pages on your website contains a link to the product page.

All your hard work on the page will go down the drain. If there are no links to your product page, search engine won’t be able to find and index it.

Terms You Should Know

Domain Authority

Domain Authority is a system that scores a website’s chance of ranking in search engines. It was originally created by Moz, and websites can score anything between 0 – 100. The higher the score, the better.

When implementing your link building strategies, domain authority is one of the factors you should consider. A link from a website with a high domain authority could be valuable because of link equity.

Link Equity

Link equity, also known as link juice, is the authority one webpage can pass to another in the form of links. For example, if a website with a high domain authority score links to you, some of that website’s “authority” is passed on to you as well.

However, the link equity that can be passed is divided equally among all the links in a webpage. If there are two links in a webpage, the link equity will be passed on equally between those two pages.

External Links

External links are links from one website to another. Most link building strategies focus on generating external links from websites with high domain authority scores.

Internal Links

Internal links are links from one webpage to another in the same domain.

Some people may consider external links more valuable, but internal links are just as important. They show search engines how your website is organised, making it easier for them to find and index your web pages.

Internal links also help users stay longer on your website. If you add relevant internal links to your content, you are encouraging users to continue consuming your content. The longer they stay on your website, the more chances you have to convince them to do business with you.

For example, in this blog post, we’ve added internal links to other blog posts about link building. We’ve published several posts on this topic before. If users are interested, they can click on the links and continue learning more about link building.

Google’s Recent Nofollow Update

Now that we’ve defined link equity, let’s talk about two more types of links.

Follow links are links that pass on link equity. These links are generally considered more valuable since they do help improve your search engine rankings. They often include links from one website to another.

Until recently, nofollow links used to be links that did not pass on link equity. These are often links on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and so forth. They are also used by websites that publish syndicated or duplicate content so search engines will know which post is the original one.

In September 2019, Google announced a new update that changed how it deals with nofollow links.

Instead of automatically ignoring nofollow links, nofollow link tags are now considered hints. This means that it’s up to Google to determine whether a link that has been tagged as nofollow will pass on link equity or not.

So, what does this mean for businesses everywhere?

It could open up a whole new avenue of link building opportunities.

For example, all the links on Wikipedia have been tagged as nofollow. Due to the recent Google update, you can start searching for relevant Wikipedia articles you can edit and start adding links to your existing content.

That is only one example. Once you start considering all the possibilities, you might discover that your current link building strategy needs a major overhaul.

Conclusion

Link building is continuously changing, and it will evolve even more by the time 2020 rolls around.

If you do business online, it’s important to understand basic link building concepts. You never know how one simple strategy could boost your search engine rankings.

Cornerstone Digital is a search engine optimisation company in Sydney. We love all things SEO and would welcome the opportunity to create a great SEO strategy for you. Talk to us today. Call us on (02) 8211 0668 or email us at info@cornerstone-digital.com.au.

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Darlyn Herradura

A self-professed book and digital marketing nerd, Darlyn Herradura focuses on building trust between customers and businesses with the written word. She understands that creating valuable content is the best way to get found online and happily spends her time doing that.