In Google’s eyes, a link is a vote of confidence. But not all votes carry the same weight. If you have a mediocre site and you link to your friends site, it means something for your friend’s organic search rankings, but not much. However, if CNN links to your friend’s site, than it will immediately increase your friend’s rankings.

That’s because, in Google’s eyes, spammy sites are more likely to link to other spammy sites and trustworthy sites are more likely to link to other trustworthy sites. So, link building isn’t simply building an army of links from other mediocre sites. You need to continue putting your brand and your company out across the web to garner more respect.

This is another reason why Social Media campaigns are important. Even though a link on a social media site isn’t nearly as important as permanent links from websites, they do create more traffic to your site, which increases your Page Score.

Is the Value of a Link Dead?

Some have said that the value of links don’t matter as much anymore as they used to. But, that’s not what has come from industry leaders such as Google’s Matt Cutts and other authorities on the subject. And, until Google says it doesn’t matter anymore, than it still does.

With the Launch of Penguin and subsequent updates, Google didn’t change their dependency on links. Instead, they only updated their ability to detect manipulation and low quality links. According to Josh Ball in the article Link Building is Sweat Plus Creativity on Search Engine Land, “This means that links are still important, but bad links will either be discounted or penalized.”

Link building is difficult, just like the other aspects of inbound marketing, because there aren’t immediate results. It takes time to build a network and to leverage that network into linking to your site. One of the most important things to remember is people don’t like sites that aren’t providing useful, current, and relevant information. Become a source of information and people will link to and visit your site.