Have you ever tried visiting a website where articles contain words or few phrases with clickable links? It does in a form of underlined, italic or with a different color that gives the readers a feeling that this could lead them to more helpful insights than what is shown in the opened tab. Although this is true, let’s see the real reason behind it is.
Connecting your article from other articles on your or other websites is called ‘Backlinking’ or ‘link building’. A backlink could be directed from a forum, another website or any online property that one can think of. This was considered as an effective yet one of the oldest forms of SEO techniques that could be irrelevant nowadays.
To explain it clearly, imagine that you are running a clothing store. You’d first try to advertise your product for the customers to get aware of it. Now that few people knows your product, they would try to refer it to their families and friends and describe how good the designs and comfortable the clothes are. In turn, they’d suggest it more to the people that they knew and so on. The more referral you can find, the more that your credibility will increase. These are the real-life situation of backlinks from buyers and referrals.
Main Reason
Just like the rest of the digital marketers, we all share a common goal, and that is to ‘create traffic on our website’. Make people click and visit our site and staying there for the longest time possible. We would want to apply every possible SEO techniques out there to let the visitors know our website, making it more prominent than the others.
Backlinking was a strategy for content managers to give Google, the most famous search engines, the impression that your website has more authority. This means that when an article is linked to another authoritative website, it’d allow more readers to view your website. The more the links from an authoritative website, the more authority it could get. The more authority a website has, the more trust they could give early on.
But how well does your content do in answering a question that people ask for? And what assurance can you get that your site is not linked to a spammed one?
The Danger
Google, just like any other website, has its algorithm. Once they saw that an article has the best or exact content that the users were trying to search, they’d place it above the search list creating more traffic for a website. Google is a smart engine that could check whether users clicked and stayed at your website or not.
Sometimes, content writers think on more how they could provide backlinks to other authoritative companies. Instead of focusing on writing good content, they tend to focus more on building links. For this reason, when users try to visit your website and they couldn’t see anything that could help them answer what they’ve searched on, Google has its ways of finding out.
After getting a Google Algorithm update, your content will move to the place where it belongs. Six months from now, if your content just doesn’t fit where the users would want it to be, it would move. If your article will drop further, Google will penalize it which makes it much dangerous.
On the other hand, when readers find your article as useful with better content, whether or not they build links to it, they’re going to stay. They could potentially read the whole thing and might probably click more articles on your website thus creating more traffic that you’re looking for.
How to Deal with this Problem ?
Focus intently on the content, not on the number and sources of backlinks. Examine these two scenarios that you could do in 60 hours. You could write an article, post it online and find an authoritative website to link it with. Here you end up writing at least a total of 10 articles. What a slow progress! Link building requires a lot of work and the site owner controls none of it no matter how successful. This is where the problem lays. “While they’re massively valuable, they are also far more difficult to get and thus far more time-consuming.”
Considering the other scenario where you make use of your time in writing a better post, minus the time you have to spend for begging people or other websites for links. Results will show you have far better and a number of articles made.
The former one would give you clickbait in order for the users to spend time in clicking your article while the latter gives you a far lost-lasting impression. You cannot trick Google into thinking that your website is better than the others just because you are linked to other websites.
Always give your site a sense of value. Try to focus more on the quality rather than the quantity. Remember that time afflicted with success. Backlinking could potentially give you an effective marketing strategy however, as time goes by, difference actions appeal to the customers. Try to at least give the suggestion above some time, probably a couple of months and notice the change that your quality article could attract people into checking it. By this time, you’d see the traffic come in; you’d see how close you are to your goal.
