Backlink Building in 2021

Last Updated: January 8th, 2021
By Adam Bilter

It is widely accepted that back-link building is one of the most important ways to optimize your website for search engine rankings. The other main way is on-page-optimization. On-page optimization is usually the first step in starting to optimize your site. This involves usually running a site audit on your site and then addressing the issues revealed in the report like dead links, alt tags, secure links, img alt tags, unique titles and descriptions, and much more. This step is like building the foundation of a house. If the foundation isn't strong, then the rest of the house won't be strong. So it is really important to do on-page optimization first.

Once you are sure that your site's foundation is solid and perfect, then comes the backlink building. In the past, some sites would pay to just have as many links built as possible becuase it was the understanding that each link was like a "vote" about how relevant your site was, and therefore, the more links you had, the higher the search engines would rank your site. However, Google has for a long time, as part of their pagerank algorithm, considered not only the number of links, but more importantly, the quality of that link. If you got one good backlink from another good, relevant site, it could be worth more that 100 poor-quality links. So, webmasters soon started focusing on high-quality links, rather than a high quantity of links. Today, backlink building has not changed much. It is still important to build links, but the links you get from other sites by just providing good, unique, relevant content are the most powerful links you can get.

And in today's day and age, you can still trade links, or earn links, or buy a high quality, high cPR link, but they must be from related, relevant, high quality, high cPR sites. And as we explained, one backlink from a cPR 6 site, is worth far far more than 100 links from a cPR 1 site. Google continues to release core algorithm updates and it is important to review each one if you are experiencing changes in rank.