As per the new Spam Policies, Google is coming for all sites that have engaged in spammy practices over the years.
After the release of the March 2024 update, many companies reported that their websites got deindexed. Manual actions were issued against companies that were using spammy practices to bring in more traffic and revenue to their site. Around 40% of low-quality and spammy content was removed by Google as per a report.
The only way to prevent your business from getting penalized is to perform manual link-building. Invest in natural backlink creation to achieve long-term results and greater success.
All you need to do is create strategic content, reach out to other companies build relationships, and try to acquire new links through outreach efforts.
With manual link building practices, you gain a high chance of building relevant and high-quality links from authoritative sources.
Unlike automated or spammy link acquisition strategies, these generally bring long-term results.
Links from authoritative sources provide insightful and helpful content, therefore a backlink from this website would be regarded as high-quality. These backlinks are even more crucial than ever in the wake of the 2024 March upgrades.
Why Sponsored or Paid Links Are Bad?
Buying or selling links is considered a bad practice as it violates Google’s policies. Based on the strength of a website’s backlink profile, Google’s algorithm is meant to determine how relevant a page is to a search query.
Websites that purchase links primarily to boost their rankings are manipulating the system, which makes the links appear spammy. This restriction only does not apply to paid links that are marked as “sponsored,” although even in that case, the links must still be relevant to your website.
Buying links might seem an easy shortcut and less time-consuming but don’t last long. On tracking the spammy link patterns, Google issues a warning to the user and if no action is taken by the site owner to fix the workings, it penalizes the website. Website Penalization will automatically drop your ranking and online visibility.
SpamBrain is an artificial intelligence system that can identify link spam patterns and devalue the associated links. In 2021 when Google changed its spam policy to prohibit link spam, a large number of websites got penalized.
Additionally, cheap links frequently direct visitors to unrelated or poor information, which degrades the user experience (UX). Google seeks to give preference to websites that offer users useful and pertinent content. Google interprets bad user experience (UX) as a signal that your website should not be shown in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
The Solution: Manual Link Building
Manual Link Building Practices involve creating links by targeting audiences with helpful and quality content rather than buying them. Here are a few important things to consider when building links manually.
Relevance
Relevant backlinks indicate to search engines that your website is reputable in its niche. In search engine optimization, relevance refers to how well the search engine results page (SERP) matches the query of the user. For example, if you want to search for “Kidney Stones”, the most relevant source that your search engine will display would be the niddk.nih.gov website. However, relevance isn’t a fixed value; the position of results in SERP might fluctuate based on the information quality and site authoritativeness.
Backlinks also work in a similar manner. The website can establish its authority to search engines and individuals who are interested in that issue by drawing links from other relevant sources within the same niche. The more relevant backlinks you create for your website, the higher targeted traffic you may drive to your site, resulting in higher conversion rates.
Acquiring relevant connections can aid in forming partnerships within a sector. Developing these connections with reputable sites lends support to a long-term link-building strategy and creates the potential for cooperation, both of which can improve a website’s online visibility.
Original Content
Another Key Factor of Manual Link Building is Quality content creation. In order to drive search rankings and a targeted audience, it is essential to ensure that you add high-quality content to your platform. With helpful and high-quality content, you address user’s queries and resolve their issues. The more you provide quality information, the more traffic it will drive to your website and increase engagement score as well as enhance user trust and brand credibility.
Also, when Google finds or observes that people are searching for your content and linking to it, then it automatically increases the amount of URLs that search engines want to crawl from your website. This is basically how much demand there is for your material in search results.
Additionally, it helps you stand out from your competitors. Google favors content that demonstrates in-depth subject matter expertise. Thin content creation does not demonstrate in-depth subject knowledge.
Proper Strategy
Producing unique content and creating relevant links can only increase your chances of appearing in search results, but to achieve your goal, you must execute a proper strategy.
Creating a plan for your manual link building campaign is essential to its success because it guarantees that you won’t waste any money when searching the internet for links.
Here is a strategy that you can execute for your business:
- Set clear goals – Link building campaigns might have specific goals, including raising website traffic, boosting search engine rankings, or becoming an authority in a given niche, which can all be clearly defined with the aid of a strategy. You must set a goal for your business and accordingly create a plan of action that would bring you quality results.
- Target audience information – By using this data, link building campaigns can be more effectively tailored to appeal to the target market and increase the possibility of obtaining relevant and high-quality backlinks. Try to learn more about your audience and use the same information with more research to drive them to visit your website.
- Competitive analysis – Gaining a competitive edge in link building can be achieved by differentiating the strategy and making decisions based on an understanding of competition strategies. Learn how your competitor is taking over the market, modify their strategies, and grab more audience to your business.
- Content planning – Creating valuable and high-quality content is crucial to building trust in the market and obtaining organic backlinks. Make sure to cross-check the information before claiming it.
- Relationship building – Establishing genuine relationships with influential members of the sector might result in chances for organic link acquisition through joint ventures, guest posting, interviews, and content partnerships. Today, social media practices are the best source to viral your content. So, try to engage in the right practices to aware your business about the brand.
- Link source Diversification – Diversification improves the overall durability of the link-building activities and lowers the possibility of search engine penalties.
- Measurement and analysis – Continuous optimization and improvement are made possible through routine performance data monitoring and analysis, which helps determine what is functioning well and what needs to be adjusted. With Google Analytics, users can better track their user behavior, purchase journey, and more information in real-time. These insights can be further used for better decision-making.
Conclusion
It will be harder than ever to get high-quality backlinks with a renewed emphasis on manual link building. The competition to claim these URLs will get more intense as more individuals try manual link building practices. However, manually building links to your website is a long-term strategy to draw relevant traffic.
However, with the right relevance, quality content, and a dash of strategy, you can stand out from your competitors. Look for natural ways to build quality backlinks for your website rather than buying in bulk and getting penalized in the future.
