How ethical or professional is it to ask for links? Well, Google’s John Mueller thinks that asking for links as a part of your outreach link building strategy is acceptable, only if done within limits.
Produce quality content and attract links
Link building is just the term as we see it, but what about the nature of links? The answer is in the context of quality content.
According to John, creating quality content is naturally going to attract people in sharing links.
At the same time, you also run the risk of going against the Google’s guidelines, if outreach link building is done inappropriately.
Seemingly, outreach link building comes in various forms. For example, offering a publisher money to have your link placed on their sites is also called link building.
Actually, this example if often misinformed to clients, in fact, it’s a paid link that was acquired through an outreach activity.
Ideal outreach link building is all about creating quality and publishing content and informing other about it.
John Mueller has further explanations on how outreach link building can go rogue on your own brand.
Providing it to people and promoting it by saying here a great content piece and they link back to you is okay. But offering a ink by saying you’ll do an exchange if you get a link isn’t an appreciated practice.
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In short, correspondences between content creators and site owners that involves payment or anything similar makes it an unnatural link.
Is outreach link building out of fashion?
Asking a publisher to link to a particular site is a daunting task for most website, regardless how top-notch the content is.
The fact that people have other options as well to express their content makes it even harder. Unfortunately, different social media platforms and YouTube do not offer backlinks that can push the atop of SERPs.
I wouldn’t say that PageRank is outdated, as publishers are often still pressurized to acquire links in an ecosystem where links have practically no use at all.
Moreover, the concept of creating top content and asking website owners to link to it has gone outdated. Apparently, today people are inclined to express themselves in contexts that do not rely on links.
