The way your website ranks in the Search Engines Result Pages (SERP) depends on many variables. One of the most important ones is the number of links in external pages pointing to your website.
Link building is the process of acquiring hyperlinks from other websites to your own. A hyperlink (usually just called a link) is a way for users to navigate between pages on the internet. Search engines use links to crawl the web; they will crawl the links between the individual pages on your website, and they will crawl the links between entire websites. There are many techniques for building links, and while they vary in difficulty, SEOs tend to agree that link building is one of the hardest parts of their jobs. Many SEOs spend the majority of their time trying to do it well. For that reason, if you can master the art of building high-quality links, it can truly put you ahead of both other SEOs and your competition.
Natural Link Building
Link building is one of the most important things you can do in terms of off-site search engine optimization. As you probably know by now, search engines like Google tend to rank pages higher in search results based on the number and quality of links to those pages. Essentially, the more links you have, the more likely you will be to rank well when someone searches for keywords related to your website .
Unnatural Link
unnatural links are artificial links mainly intended to manipulate a page’s ranking. These can include purchased links or links created by scrapers and spammers that attach themselves to your site under the radar and potentially link your site to another in a bad neighborhood of the internet.
Unnatural links became a Google target after their Penguin update in mid-April of 2012. The algorithm update was established to penalize sites for low-quality links, over-optimized anchor text and keyword stuffing – all tactics that Google considers unfair and unbeneficial to users. As a result of the recent upgrade, all negative SEO and questionable page ranking tactics have been targeted, but at what cost?
Why Unnatural Links Are Harming Small Businesses
If Google is suspicious of a site they can take manual action, where a member of the support team manually delists the site from the search results. When a warning is sent out to a site it is given a time frame of about six months to alter and delete malignant unnatural links. The owners of the site are then urged to submit a reconsideration request. Without this request the site will reach its expiration date.
After a site is tagged for unnatural links their rankings on search engine pages will generally dramatic decrease, and this can have a drastic affect on small businesses that operate online. Small companies without SEO technicians to help the company’s products fall into the lap of the searcher and work to to dissolve unnatural links are then left at the mercy of dropping search results. Without this key lead generation channel, many small businesses are doomed.
