Link Building, Inbound Link, Reciprocal Link:
The Good, Bad, and Ugly
What is an inbound link?
The inbound link people also call a backlink, incoming link, in-link, inward link, and link back. It all means the same thing - another website links to your website.
Inbound link & SEO
Is link building good, bad, or ugly? The answer is - it all depends on what kind of link.
A link from a fake website with a downgraded domain is terrible. Don't even think about it.
Buying links to boost your website ranking is simply ugly; even if you get the desired boost in traffic, this traffic will last only a short time. Then the search engine will downgrade your domain the traffic will disappear. Many clients have come to us with this problem lately and asked us to fix it.
A good quality link you can obtain when you are a regular contributor to a professional online publication, where the publisher displays your BIO with the link to your business or personal website. If you join a professional directory in your field, that is an excellent link.
Best inbound link
And if a local newspaper decides to write an article about you and your business and mentions your website in that article - it is the best link you can find on the Internet. Why? Because it is a naturally created link!
Reciprocal link building
Clients often ask us, "Do I need to exchange links with other websites and start my reciprocal link campaign?" Our answer is, "No, you don’t."
Here are a few reasons we feel that reciprocal links are a waste of time:
- First, exchanging links with your competitor would mean giving your business away.
- Second, you have no control over their website's quality. Their website could easily be fake. Things on the web change very fast - a good website can become full of Spam six months later, and you have no time to watch all sites you exchange links with. Then search engines will downgrade their website and your website because both websites have a link connection.
- Third, unless you're a Webmaster yourself, updating websites is not free. To add the new link to your reciprocal link exchange page, you have to pay your Webmaster.
- Finally - search engines ignore most of these reciprocal links.
Our advice is to concentrate on becoming a contributor to a professional online publication in your field of expertise. This is the best action you can take to promote your website on the Internet for free.
Inbound link building and website content
Most importantly - create valuable content for your website, update your website with new articles frequently, and you will earn many naturally created links because people like to share articles packed with useful information.
Inbound link building and Search Engine Guidelines
Need more information? Check out what Google, and Bing have to say on the topic:
For us at Digital Mosaics, search engine optimization is a world of endless opportunities. We love our work, and we are proud that our websites get more and more organic traffic every single day.
Additional Resources:
Best Practices and Common Mistakes in SEO (2014). This video prepared by Google covers three major topics: mobile sites SEO, multilingual, and multi-regional sites in search results, and monitoring SPAM abuse.
Personalized Search Results. This Google blog post explains how personalized search works and how 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser affect your search results.
Link Building. Inbound Link. Reciprocal Link. Learn what Google's position on link building is.
Last updated on January 2, 2024.
Questions? Comments? Need an estimate? Send us an e-mail at gale@digitalmosaics.net
We are based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and proudly serve clients in Las Vegas, North Las Vegas, Henderson, and the rest of the world.