First, let me tell you what a backlink is … it’s a link from a website to your website, that’s it. Pretty technical right? The link serves a few purposes:

1. It provides Google with the ability to find you on the Internet by allowing it to follow preexisting websites to yours.
2. It allows Google to assign a PageRank to your website based on who else is willing to link to you.
3. It allows people to find you by following hyperlinks from one website to another.

So a backlink is a link from one website to another which drives traffic and increases the value of the second (target) website.

Backlinks to Avoid

The old marketing adage is that all publicity is good publicity but in the case of backlinks, that’s not entirely true. There are some type of backlinks which serve either no purpose or end up damaging your websites reputation. For example:

1. Paid Links. It’s possible to pay companies to link to you and usually it’s pretty cheap to do so but it’s proven to be fatal for websites. Major search engines such as Google look very poorly on websites which provide this service or try to benefit from it. Here are two great blog posts written to help you understand how Google punishes people for paid links:
   • Matt Cutts Confirms Paid Links & Google PageRank Update
   • Can Google Find and Spank your Paid Links?
2. Link Farms. A link farm is a series of websites all linking to each other with the hopes of transferring PageRank between themselves. Self contained ecosystems, be it economies or websites are bound to fail. Google is a very, very smart company with some exceedingly talents minds at work … in my opinion using the computer power of the big G would make detecting Link Farms fairly easy and they’ve made no secret about punishing offenders.

What are good backlinks?

The best, and strongest links to generate between websites are the honest ones. I don’t know if I’ve made that clear enough throughout my website so I’ll restate it. The best backlinks to generate are the ones which are completely and without fail genuine. I give Google (and other search engines) a lot of credit for being run by pretty smart people for a reason, they won’t hire me … so when people ask me about SEO services, I generally tell them the same things:

1. Write quality content.
2. Promote quality content.
3. Support quality content.
4. Contribute to the Internet.

In real world terms, it’s fairly easy to do all three of these.

1. Write Quality Content

I write a half dozen posts a week that get published but about another two dozen get started and never finished. Writing for my blog is a 20 hour a week job, it’s how I relax and practice my writing skills. To be honest, I don’t think I’ve a very good writer but it gives me a chance to improve by receiving feedback from much better writers.

2. Promote quality content

When I write good content I try to include a few links to other better content as well, so my readers can find out where I received my information, sort of like a bibliography. This serves two purposes:

1. It provides you, the reader with the ability to follow those links and learn more about the subject being covered and;
2. It provides the original authors with credit for providing great content

Strangely there’s a third, link building reason for website owners to credit others in our writings. When I include a link to another article in my post, my website (powered by WordPress) automatically sends a message to the other authors website informing them that I’ve cited their article in mine. This PingBack is an automated notification system designed to help blog authors communicate and one startling benefit is that many blog owners will in turn link back to your original article (if it’s valuable), creating a free backlink to your website.

3. Support quality content

Every morning I fetch articles from 700 different quality news sources and skim through the headlines to find at least a dozen articles which will help me or my clients be more successful on the web, then I read the articles and if I have anything valuable to contribute to the article I add a comment for the blog author to consider adding.

Blog comments (such as what you will find at the bottom of this article) are powerful marketing tools. Every day I comment on two or three articles and I try to make those comments as relevant and useful as possible, this drives endless traffic to my website as clicks (in fact, more than purchased advertising) but it also tells major search engines that my content is valuable and my contributions are respected by the website author.

4. Contribute to the Internet

Possibly the easiest way to build massive backlinks in a short period of time … contribute something useful to the Internet. It doesn’t have to be Earth shattering, my article Creating a Splash Screen in Torque Game Builder generates five unique page visits per day because it’s helpful and free. I have backlinks located in key locations throughout the Internet for this article but more importantly? It’s useful. Take the time to write quality how-to articles, build a plugin for your favorite software or make an animation that puts a smile on your face, contribute to the Internet in a useful manner and you’ll build significant traffic.

Conclusions

Building quality links from other websites will take time, it’s would be faster and easier to cheat but the people you’re trying to cheat are very clever and very dedicated to catching you. I once heard a comment by a visiting police officer to a grade six class, he said that criminals by-and-large forgot one simple fact … being a criminal was hard work, one minor mistake could get you caught and the police had a lot of very smart people dedicated to catching criminals. I think that’s very true for black hat SEO as well, tricking Google is easy … but getting caught is also very easy and in the end if you want to benefit from the services they offer, the best way to build a strong online business is to be honest, support the community and build a better web for all mankind.