Great Content Deserves Great Links

Here at Artemis we have always focused on helping clients acquire the highest quality and most relevant links to their websites. Links are still a very critical component for successful rankings, particularly in competitive industries.

Ever since Google became the dominant search engine with its links-based algorithm, people have tried to fool Google into ranking their websites using spam driven link building methods. Over the years, Google has become exceptional at recognising spam backlinks and demoting websites that don’t deserve to rank because of their spam link profiles.

As Google now understands what constitutes a spam backlink, the attention has very much shifted towards rewarding “earned” links. Links cannot be bought, bartered or acquired in an unnatural way that contravenes Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

Getting links to a website today is much more time consuming and complicated than ever before. The standards required for links to have a positive effect are now so high that many agencies no longer offer link building services.

Earning Links

In 2018, a link is no longer a link; a link has to be earned and the website receiving the benefit of that link must be deserving of it. Link building, on-page optimisation and content cannot be looked at in isolation.

When Google finds a new link to a website, it will calculate both the value of the link where it is and the value of the page that it’s linking to. From this it will then determine what value, if any, to pass through the link from one site to the other.

A link on an irrelevant website, or in an unrelated context, or in a badly written article or where it appears that it may have been placed there for SEO purposes, this type of link will just be ignored by Google.

However, should the link appear on a good website, in context, in a good article and not appear to be for SEO purposes only, then Google will look to see if the receiving page for that link deserves to benefit from that link.

The receiving page needs to:

• Be of a high value
• Have relevant and useful content
• Have unique content
• Have fresh content

In other words, why should the receiving page merit the benefit of the link? There has to be a reason. Freshness signals are particularly important. In many cases, static, often outdated content, should not be worthy of a fresh new link.

Links cannot be looked at in isolation. Links must be earned and that means that pages that links are pointing to need to be regularly refreshed with new, up-to-date content. Alternatively, creating new pages with new content that is “link worthy” is a natural way to build fresh links to a website.

Websites never get penalised for having too much great content! Great content deserves new links.

Here are at Artemis we are constantly working with clients to ensure the continuous generation of quality content for their websites to complement the high-quality links that their websites are earning.