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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Why Is Link Building So Controversial? - Entrepreneur

Last updated Tuesday, September 21, 2021 09:01 ET , Source: NewsService

It's loved. It's hated. It's promoted and criticized. And in my opinion, it's misrepresented and misunderstood.

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

It’s loved. It’s hated. It’s promoted and criticized. And in my opinion, it’s misrepresented and misunderstood.

Link building, in the general sense, is a marketing tactic closely associated with search engine optimization (SEO). The idea is simple. Construct links pointed back to specific pages of your website, using external domains (and preferably, high-authority ones). Allow those links to funnel traffic to your pages immediately. Over time, benefit from the increased “domain authority” that these links give you and increase your chances of ranking highly in search engines.

It’s straightforward and easy for even a non-expert in the realm of SEO to understand.

So why is it so controversial?

A checkered past

You could say that link building has a checkered past. Since its inception, Google’s search engine algorithm has preferentially ranked sites that demonstrated high levels of trustworthiness, utilizing a system known as PageRank. In its early stages, PageRank simply calculated a website’s authority based on the number of links pointing to it and the authority levels of the referring sources.

Aggressive practitioners worked quickly to take advantage of this, essentially spamming links to improve their rankings quickly. In this era, it would have been appropriate to label link building as a scourge...



Read Full Story: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/379998

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