Should You Avoid Building Backlinks  in Your SEO?

 

Recently, John Mueller – a webmaster analyst with Google – took part in a Google+ Hangout and a question arose about whether webmasters should focus on link building.

The best question revolved around – Does Backlink Building Work ?

He urges it might cause more damage for your web site than anything great in the event that you do and you don’t focus on link building.

Here was the response…

 

In short, he said that webmasters should avoid attempting to concentrate on link building.

He additionally added commentary that warned about link building doing more damage than good.

In most cases, we would agree with John Mueller, but you have to realize that Google has to answer certain questions a certain way.

In fact, they often send mixed messages that are layered in nuance to avoid being pinned down to anything definitive.

The truth is…link building can be quite effective, especially with content that is high quality.

Thus, your primary focus need to be on producing excellent content that resonates with people regardless of any how many links are build.  Once you do so, any active efforts to increase links to the content will be that much more powerful and immune to any downside.

Link building is just about helping others find your material.  Anyone ignoring this aspect will be short-cutting their websites potential.

However, on the flip side, there is no point in building links to content of poor quality.  In this case, you ARE doing more harm than good over the long haul.

We believe this is the underlying nuance that is left out of the answer by John Mueller.

He’s assuming (and probably correctly), that the question implies a greater focus on link building versus quality of content.

On strictly it’s surface, the guidance by Mueller would make it impossible for a web site to rank for competitive terms till they have assembled a huge crowd. This is not practical and creates a Catch-22.

Thus, you must do BOTH…focus on creating high quality content AND build quality backlinks as part of your SEO efforts.

Does Backlink Building Work in SEO?