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TRENDING UPWARDS: Black Hat vs White Hat link building

What sort of SEO methods are you using in your business? If you love being Google's favourite child and play by the book, you're doing White Hat SEO and follow the guidelines. If you're a bit of a rulebreaker and try to trick Google, you're using Black Hat techniques.

Unsure on which method you currently use or which you should choose for your SEO strategy? Tune into episode three of the Trending Upwards podcast as Digital 22's SEOs Danielle and Anthony run through the Black Hat vs White Hat link building debate.

They run through the history of link building, tactics to avoid and the future of link building. If that wasn't enough dedication, they even came dressed the part. Click the play button below to get their insights.

 

The history of link building

Danielle and Anthony first run through a brief history link building. It stretches as far back as 2012, when Google released Penguin as a response to the increasing practice of manipulating search results (and rankings) through black hat link building techniques. 

Before Penguin, link volume played a larger part in determining a webpage’s scoring when crawled, indexed and analysed by Google. Its role was to ensure natural, authoritative and relevant links rewarded the websites they pointed to, while spammy links were downgraded.

Fancy hearing more on the history of link building and how it's evolved? Make sure to tune in to the episode above.

The tactics to avoid

If that wasn't enough, the guys also share some tactics you should avoid in your SEO strategy. These include:

  • Excessive sidebar and footer links
  • Avoid deindexed domains
  • Forum posting
  • Blog post signature spamming
  • Link networks

Another interesting point raised was the concept of link schemes. Anthony also runs through how any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in the Google SERP can be considered as being part of a link scheme.

Yep, you guessed it, it violates Google's guidelines too. Some examples of link schemes that can negatively impact a site's ranking include:

The future of link building

In between all of the useful insights, Danielle and Anthony also run through what the future of link building could look like. This includes thinking about the users and not search engines, more attribution and more authenticity.

They also explain the Digital 22 process and why our stance always remains that we'll never pay for links. 

That's a quick rundown of what Danielle and Anthony discuss in this episode. There's plenty more useful information you can't afford to miss if you're in the SEO world, so make sure to hit a play button above to implement their advice right away.


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