Google’s John Mueller answered a question about natural links and mentioned that link building awareness is okay as long as certain lines haven’t been crossed.
Create quality content and get links to it
The person asking the question had just received an answer to their question about link exchanges. So now he was commenting on the nature of a natural bond, which it is.
He framed it in the context of quality content.
The comment:
“Like, we have to create quality content, naturally people will give us a link. It’s only natural or something because… ”
Mueller validates awareness of bonding… to a point
John Mueller did not use the words bonding or outreach.
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However, the gist of what he said was about the process of educating publishers to let them know about the content. This is generally known as link building awareness.
The strategy is to create content that publishers would be interested in linking to and then promote it to publishers who tend to link to that type of content.
John Mueller commented on the awareness for bonding:
“That’s basically the idea behind the kind of natural connection.
From our perspective, it’s good to reach out to people and tell them it’s like by the way, I have this great content and… maybe this is something you would like for your website.
It is generally good.
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When linking awareness violates Google guidelines
Linking awareness can also go against Google guidelines.
There are many forms of link building awareness. For example, soliciting a publisher to offer them money to place links on their site is also called link building awareness.
This type of link building is usually misrepresented to clients as outreach link building when in reality it is a paid link that has been organized through outreach.
The real link building in awareness is posting great content and telling others about it.
John Mueller explains how building outreach links can go wrong:
“But anything beyond what you say like, well… you have to link to me like this or you have to pay me money or I’ll pay you money for that link or j ‘swap something for this link …
This is something that, from our point of view, would make it an unnatural connection.
So providing it to people and promoting it and saying that this is great content and that they are referring you is perfectly fine.
Um… providing it and saying I would trade if you give me a link, that’s something we would consider unnatural.
Related: Reciprocal Links: Do They Help Or Hurt Your SEO?
Is the creation of outreach links obsolete?
Getting a publisher to link to a site is difficult and nearly impossible for some sites, regardless of the quality of their content.
What makes the process even more difficult is that people have more options for expressing themselves today than in the days of blogging.
Unfortunately, those platforms that people express themselves on, like social media and YouTube, don’t provide links that can help a site rank higher.
The world for which PageRank was created no longer exists.
Yet publishers are still under pressure to get links from an online ecosystem where links no longer exist.
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The idea of creating great content and having someone link to it is seemingly an outdated concept, as people today are speaking in contexts that don’t support linking. .
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Watch Google’s John Mueller discuss the scope of links starting at around 11 minutes.