Why link building is a mundane practice?

Last updated on December 15, 2009. Tags: link building, search engine algorithm, white hat SEO

The practice of link building arises on the democratic nature of the search engine algorithms. The assumption is that, the more links are pointing towards a web page, the more relevant it is and therefore the higher position it can reach in search engine results. In ideal scenario, webmasters should link to other websites (and not their own) that they find really useful, but several webmasters deliberately building links towards their websites on anywhere they can post links such as guestbooks, blog comments and forums.

I remember a year ago. I was deeply studying the concept of search engine optimization, I studied how forum signatures and blogpost can be used to generate backlinks. What I did is that I visited lots of forums, determined their Google PR using different online tools, checked if they automatically post rel="nofollow" attribute and even determined if their robots.txt will in anyway hinder the spill of "PR juice." I did this to 22 different forums, mostly are web design forums, business forums and Filipino forums.

Out of those 22, only 6 were useful for my backlink building plans. Others automatically insert the nofollow attribute in links while others require 100 or even greater number of posts. I even have a list of which forums insert nofollow, which forum has nofollow in robots.txt, the Google PR of each of them, etc. I signed-up to all 22 of these forums (in some of them, I already have an existing account even before I started learning SEO).

I participated in all 6 forums, as well as some of the ones that insert nofollow just because I am already at ease with those communities. I fixed my signature and ensure that for every post I made, I can generate backlinks for some of my and my clients' websites. During this time, I was planning to look for more forums and increase my list of useful forums from 6 to 100.

A well conceived plan eh? Let's see what happened.

I find this practice stressful, and I don't see any significant changes in the search engine position of my websites. I need to spend four hours participating in all of these forums. If I find it difficult to participate in 6, how much more in 100. Perhaps I can only succeed by posting short posts such as "hello", "nice post" or smileys, but that would be against the terms and conditions of most of these forums.

Then, I decided to give link building through forums a low priority i.e., I post only whenever I have spare time and focus more on experimenting on how to modify WordPress for on-page SEO (that's why you find lots of those stuff here at Codeleet). I also removed a clients' websites from my signature because after three months of link building, that site still could not reach page 1 for it's targetted two-word keyphrase. Anyway, I didn't promise any ranking or link building for that client.

Around two months later, I signed-up for Google Analytics. Using Google Analytics, I was able to see over the course of one year how my traffic steadily increases despite having minimal backlink building campaign. I also found out that aside from search engine traffic, most of my visitors are actually coming from the forums that I visit and post regularly even though they adds nofollow attribute to links. I also noticed how my visitors arrived through posts rather than through homepage. Thus, I decided that I will focus much more on building content.

What I find the most astonishing is that the client's website, the one I removed from my signature, finally made it to page 1 in the targetted two-word keyphrase, after nine months of not being in my signature. I checked if some other high PR site links to it using Yahoo Site Explorer but there's none. Basically, it was able to climb up only through age factor. Note that I never updated anything from this website since it was put online except for some spelling errors as requested by the client.

I would also like to point out that I also submitted this client's website to 19 online directories roughly during the same it was in my forum signatures. Out of 19, only three of them replied saying they already added the website. Then, when I checked the backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer few days ago, no directory is linking towards that client's website.

Hence, I decided that I will focus on only two things: building content and making my website/blog search engine friendly. Building backlinks will be a bottom priority. While I will continue to participate in forums, it is only to give my websites exposure, and not backlink or PR juice. For these reason, I decided to participate in forums that really suits my site and not my interest, with or without PR juice link.

This is the main reason why I always reject linkbuilding projects in ODesk. I even mentioned in my provider profile that I do not do backlink building.

Posted by Greten on May 29, 2009 under Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

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Posted by JB on 06.18.10 2:20 pm

I have been researching SEO for some time. You make some great points. Surely what we are seeing is the triumph of content over style. For too long websites were all gadgets and gizmos with very little original quality content.

Me myself I have been playing with Wordpress and trying to make it SEO friendly. Its ok but seem very slow.
Posted by Greten on 07.01.10 5:04 pm

Yes its very slow, but I find working on content less boring. Working on backlinks is kinda repetitive. While I also do that, it’s of lesser priority than building quality content.

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