I spent this evening reading about Link Building. The question is now, what is acceptable link building? The all mighty Google has recent issued warnings to us yet again. I know what used to be OK, but nowadays Google has said that any link that is paid is against Google’s guidelines and that Google plans on penalizing sellers and buyers of links.

I never quite understood penalizing buyers of links? Are you saying now, do not buy links for your website to rank well, buy bad links for your competitors sites so they get penalized? I think I may have to run an experiment on this :-P.

Well it seems now that the masses are kind of fed up with Google’s rules, and I have read in a very popular SEO (Search Engine Optimization) forum that based upon Google’s latest guidelines that nearly every single SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company on earth is now going to be considered black hat (black hat, a term used to describe SEO companies that do not 100% obey Google). Google does not want people “optimizing anything”, they do not want link building, they accept link baiting (although link baiting it now the equivalent of fishing in a pond with 8 BILLION other pieces bait, even if you have the best bait in the pond how is the fish to find you? Google. Can you answer this?) So tighten your drawers, Google is going to change the rules, yet again.

Many SEO experts have been discussing whether anything is really going to change, or if they are just going to scream longer and louder this time? The truth be told that most sharp link builders are always going to be 3-4 steps ahead of Google, and Google will never catch up to these guys. So why bother, all Google is doing is increasing the profitability of the really good link builders. Links are the glue that keep the internet as one, and without them, the internet would be 100’s of 1000’s little internets all completely separate, can never do away with links Google.

Most SEO’s now know that Google does not look fondly upon: links in footers and sidebars, labeling links as sponsored ads or sponsored links, so these old school techniques are now fruitless and hardly worth paying for.

So what Google has done is raise the bar, what we are all going to see is the price of great links going way UP! In recent history, you could get a nice bunch of PR4-5 links for say $35 per month, well I bet in the next 6 months a solid PR5 link is going to be $250 a month, why you ask? Because Google is making it much harder to build out links that are going to pass link juice and count towards your search engine ranking and placement. Google has been applying discounts to nearly all links, footer links, sidebar links, site wide links and any kind of link floating around your website is probably only worth about 25% of what it used to be worth, because Google has been discounting these types of links further and further.

Knowing this a multitude of options and opportunities for links in text have been born. Google views these links in text as a premeditated link. Of course people are all over this theory. There are Pay for Review sites now (where you post a review of a site or product and they include links back to your website), there are 4 versions of software that will index a website and turn any piece of text into a link and so on.

So the next step in Google trying to stay ahead of the link market is relevancy. Not your old standby, a couple of sentences on topic, now you will be required to have an entire page probably 400 words or greater on topic (and you better not even try to have more then 5-6 links per page) or Google will probably not count those links.

Google is driving the price of good, under the radar links UP, so you better forget about the old stand buy link brokers, where quantity was the ticket.  Now you better look for quality, as this is all that will matter, 1 super high quality link is going to be all you need to get vastly improved ranking in the near future.