In the last lesson, I introduced you to some basic ways to understand the value of links and what makes one link more valuable than another. In this lesson, I'll discuss some of the basic concerns that Google has with the concept of link building. And I'll also provide you with common sense guidelines that you can use to avoid pursing link building tactics that search engines don't like. In future lessons, I'll show you why content marketing's a great way to avoid these tactics. And it's also very important to have a core understanding of the basic characteristics of high quality links. Let's start. So to start with, I want to share some of the thoughts of Matt Cutts, who used to be in charge of the web spam team at Google. I did an interview with him a couple years back, and here's what he said when I asked him his thoughts on link building. He said, it segments you into a mindset, and people get focused on the wrong things. Well, what did he mean by that? Really, what he's getting at here is that Google doesn't want you to be so focused on getting rankings in their search engine that you do things for that purpose only, even if it otherwise makes no sense as a marketing tactic. Because it kind of gets disconnected with the way their search engine algorithms actually work. And it works better for them if you're just really promoting your business very effectively. And this is a lot of what we're going to talk about in this content marketing module. So, another thing that Matt Cutts said was in this blog post that he published in 2014, the decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO. Sounds like kind of a daunting title to this article. And in fact, he says, if you're using guest blogging as a way to gain links, you should probably stop. So the reason why he wrote this article is that it became a very popular tactic among SEOs to actually go out and get guest blogs and point links back to their site, but it got so popular that SEOs stopped caring about whether those blog posts had any value to users or not, and they were just doing it in DROS and publishing all this kind of crappy content, simply because it helped them rank higher than Google. That actually didn't bring any real end-user value to the web. This is the kind of thing that Google doesn't like. But on the other hand, another interview I did, Matt Cutts, he also said this, in fact this is, well, I said this, this is the title of the interview. But in it, Matt made it clear that link building, as a concept, is not actually illegal or inherently bad. It's a matter of how you go about it. And I'm going to go through this in this lesson and in the next couple of lessons. So, the first thing you need to understand is that links must be valid citations. Now I'm actually showing you something clipped of an academic paper. So, think about professors that you knew in school that were doing research papers, or if you were asked to do a research paper as part of a project while you were in school. At the end, you included citations, really, to the other documents that you referenced and other resources that you made use of. Those are what you call citations. And what makes them unique is nothing has been paid to get those citations. It's just someone whose benefited from something actually sharing what they benefited from with other people. And so that's what I mean by being a valid citation. Think of it this way, it needs to be really an editorially given link. Simply given because the person giving it to you, believes it has value to the people on their webpage. So, let's talk about some things you can't do. Well, you can't vote for yourself, and what I mean by that is, any scheme where you could go out on the web and actually just publish a link back to your own site, and nobody reviews it and it's just your own action, it doesn't count, that's not an editorially given vote. Doesn't mean someone else is saying that your content has value. And that's really important to understand, that this is something that you can't do. You also can't stuff the ballot box, can't do that or shouldn't do that in a normal political election. And what I mean by this is, you can't go doing things to artificially inflate the number of votes that you're getting. Some rules of thumb I want you to think about, would you have invested time to get a given link if Google didn't exist? If the answer to that question is no, then the link probably has no value, or would you have proudly shown this link to a perspective customer pre-sale, or would it embarrass you? If we show it to your children, would you be proud of it, right? And then also, did the person giving you the link mean it as a genuine endorsement? If not, that's a problem. And lastly, this is actually my favorite of the rules that I'm giving you here. If you have to argue that it's a good link, then you already know it's not, because there should be no argument required. It should be obvious that it's the good link. So, a couple more concepts. Well, links can't be purchased, right? And I'm saying that because if you pay for a link, and you pay someone to put it on their website, that's not editorially given, right? They're not giving it because they think it's good for their customers. They're giving it to you because you paid for it. At least their intentions are compromised by the fact that you paid for it. It can't be just a barter. In fact, there's a very popular thing that happened in link building for a few years back, where people just swapped links with each other, and they were doing it en masse. Literally swapping the thousands of other websites to get more links to help drive search engine rankings. Well search engines don't value that. They can recognize that it's just a swap with little value. By the way, I'm not saying you should never swap links, but you should only swap links with sites that are extremely relevant and valuable to your business, and from which you're willing to actually send some visitors from your site to theirs because it's useful to them. And then, lastly, it can't be stolen. And you're going to say, why are you saying something can be stolen? Actually it turns out that there are black hat SEOs, as we call them, who have ways of injecting in millions of blogs and forum sites, links, like these, that you see here. And those are effectively stolen, or hacking into your website code, and inserting links within the source code of the site. So anyway, this was a pretty high level view on how to see what Google wants from links, but it's important to understand the course concepts. If you can internalize these, you can use them as guidelines to keep you from falling into the trap of pursuing links in a way that is fundamentally at odds with the search engines. To help cement this concept, in the next lesson, I'll review in detail a number of different types of links that Google doesn't like, as well as show you some of the types of links they do like.
