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by gnaritas 3274 days ago
> A company who wants to compete in more or less established market will have no choice but work on link building.

Link building isn't adding any value to your site; you're merely trying to game the search engine who doesn't want to be gamed and who actively resists gaming by hiring some of the smartest people in the world to ferret out and eliminate your tricks. Google wants good content, not back links (back links are only a proxy they use to rate quality and only one of many), focus on good content and the rest will follow automatically without gaming the search engine which is only ever a temporary win at best. Trying to continually "trick google" by creating more links to your site that natural traffic would warrant is not a good long term strategy. Creating content people want is always a good strategy and works long term and removes you from the trying to trick google game which removes you from being taken out by a change in their algo aimed squarely at you fake back linkers.
1 comments
ivm 3274 days ago
I think you use a narrow definition of a backlink which is "asking a link to weak content". Asking to add a new app to somebody's "Useful tools for ..." list is link building too.

> Google wants good content, not back links

Google relies on "dofollow" backlinks from big sites more than anything, check different researches on ranking and backlink count correlation.

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gnaritas 3274 days ago
Google relies on an ever changing definition of what they consider "good content", which may currently include dofollow back-links and may not in the future. Optimize for good content and you don't have to worry about such ever changing implementation details. Trying to figure out how Google currently works is a losing arms race, understanding what Google is trying to do, find good content, and providing it, is a winning strategy.

All those stories about people losing their businesses because Google changed their algorithm, those were people trying to game Google to promote their content higher than it should have been, Google will always win that contest.

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