Link building is the backbone of search engine optimization.  This is the very reason why most website owners and search engine optimization professionals bend rules and adopt various kinds of tactics to make their link building strategies “more superior” than their competitors.

If you will take a closer look on how link building is implemented in most SEO campaigns, it is not uncommon that you will find search professionals practicing all sorts of unethical ways to game the system.  This is because ethical link building is hard to come by, especially if competition is very stiff and all your competitors are doing all the dirty tricks to improve their websites’ search rankings.

What is Ethical Link Building?

Ethical link building is simply the ways of building back-links which are in line with the rules set by web search engines.  One of the most common rules is to build links naturally.  Links accumulated naturally are viewed by search engines as more valuable and have higher relevance compared to automated links and other links accumulated through unnatural means.  Also, natural back-links will never be labeled as spam by search engines.  This means that your website will be safe from any future algorithm changes and updates designed to counter unnatural link-building and web spams.

Implications of Ethical Link Building to SEO

Building back links through ethical means is the only way to maintain long-lasting SEO results without the fear of being penalized by search engines or being labeled as spam.  Though ethical link building takes time and requires more efforts, website owners should realize that it’s the only way to safeguard their reputation as a business while maintaining a good back-link profile in the eyes of the search engines.

Ethical link building brings more lasting benefits not only in improving search rankings but also in maintaining consistency and in upholding the credibility of your business, the exact opposite of building unnatural back-links.  Unnatural link building usually happens when a certain link building strategy is abused and used in ways that broke the rules on how links are built naturally.

In building back links, always keep in mind that quality is more important than quantity.  And using dirty tricks to game the system is already a thing in the past as search algorithms are constantly rehauled to get rid of practitioners engaging in dirty trades and tactics to spam the web.

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Photo Credit: Chain Link by Gordon Griffiths.  Licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

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