SEO is all about optimizing your website, but a significant amount of SEO actually occurs off your site, when other people voluntarily place a link to your website on their own. Enough of these “backlinks” can convince a search engine crawler that your site is relevant to a specific topic, and deserves to be highly ranked when a search is performed. But actually getting those links can be a delicate process.
In the early days of SEO, agencies told clients, “We can get your site to the number one search ranking in no time at all,” and most of the time they actually were able to do it. But only briefly, and in a manner that was in no way sustainable. The majority of these “black hat” professional link building companies were simply paying websites to place links. The search engines figured this out early on, and clamped down hard on anyone trying to buy their way to the top.
With the advent of social media, some professional link building companies turned to automated social bookmarkin Continue reading “The Colorful History of Professional Link Building”