Link building. Google frowns upon it, in fact, they say you really should not do it and yet without good links, trying to get long term search engine rankings that are stable and worthwhile is nigh on impossible.

You need good links

Of course, you can have an amazing website with content that is adored, cherished and sought-after, and yes, it might get the odd share on social media or one or two links back, but will this really be enough to make your website rank where it needs to? In all fairness, probably not, and therefore here lies the main problem. You need good links. But you shouldn’t build them. You should hope that people link to you naturally.

Sounds ideal? Well, in theory, and if we all lived in rose gardens with sunshine 300 days of the year and an endless supply of happiness, this would be great, but in the online, real world, the practicalities or likelihood of this happening enough to make your link profile amazing is pretty much an impossibility.
Add to this fact that you have no control over who links to you, having a link profile can often be a major headache for so many businesses and website owners. The need to build great links and stop people linking to you with rubbish links is a challenge, because as we say, you shouldn’t hunt links, and you have no control over who places a link to your site, so what do you do to make everything hunky dory and keep your link profile decent?

Here are five things you should be doing.

Quarterly Link Audits

Four times a year I would suggest you run a full link audit, where you download your link profile from Majestic or Moz and also Google Webmaster Tools and then run through them, in detail, marking good links, bad links and links to keep an eye on in the future. As time goes on, you should then record the links you have previously disavowed (we will come to this in a minute) and then make sure that over the course of the year, you are seriously on top of your link profile.

Monthly Quick Checks

Once again, using Moz or Majestic you should check your new incoming links on a weekly or monthly basis, and if anything is looking dodgy, you can get them removed quickly or act using the disavow method. Generally, link removal is the best option, but in practice, this is often much easier said than done, so you might just have to add them to your disavow file. Either way, the sooner you act on bad links, the less time they will have to hurt your rankings.

Disavow The Bad

As we discuss above, you can create a disavow file and add this to the Google Webmaster disavow tool, which means you are basically telling Google not to use any of the links in this file in terms of counting towards your link profile. The process is easy enough, but do bear in mind, it will take time for Google to action your updates; they need to take the file and then crawl it correctly, for it to then be applied to your profile. Also bear in mind that these links will still show in your reports as they are not removed, just ignored, so they will just not be counted as relevant.

Build A Balanced Profile

If you are going to go and build links, you need to be avoiding making patterns, have a diverse link profile and do not concentrate on building solely amazing links. Your profile needs to be reflective and natural, and no site in the world has a 100% high-quality link profile. Therefore, spread your links, a few directories, a few blog posts, a few mentions, etc., and do not always go for Do Follow links, as having some no follow links helps to make your profile look natural as a mixture.

Slowly, Slowly And Slowly

Our final point is that as the saying goes, Rome was not built in a day, and nor should your link profile be, so take your time and do not build a ton of links for three months and then nothing for the rest of the year, as this is not only unnatural, but will often lead you to a penalty, there is no doubt about that. Links should be built over time and not in one go, so plan your approach and get it right. Otherwise, you will be looking at dealing with some serious issues long term.

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