The importance of transparency and understanding risk in link building

The most important part of the relationship between you and your link builder might not be what you think.

You want them to follow Google’s guidelines (or you might not care) and build great links.

You want their work to give you more traffic and better rankings.

You may be fine with certain risky tactics, or you may only be building links because your competitors are, and you feel the need to keep up.

You may think you want a lot of things, but what you really need is transparency.

Transparency

I’ve spoken to business owners and webmasters who used a link team in the past and never saw the links that were built.

In my opinion, that’s not right. You know exactly where the links are, even if you created content in hopes it would generate links, so you can easily dig around and find out where those links are and report them.

I’ve also dealt with a lot of people who do know which links were built and had no idea how they were built.

1. Are they on a private blog network (PBN)?

2. Were they purchased?

3. Are they within Google’s guidelines?

4. Were they built by the person hired to do the job, or were they handed off to another company?

We have a serious problem in the link-building industry, and it is not simply the divide between doing things the “right” way and taking more risks. It’s more about being honest and upfront about the work itself.

[Read the full article on Search Engine Land.]