The topic of link building is mentioned a lot by many SEO professionals, including me. Every website needs a good number of other websites linking to it in order to achieve good standing in search engines.Link building was once thought of as a race to get inbound links to your website. It didn't matter where the links came from as long as you had them. Because it didn't matter, many SEO service companies were setting up blogging websites and linked every page of the blog to their client's website.
This process easily generated hundreds of links from blogging websites over to business websites. Sadly, many times those blogging websites were machine generated blog posts that were so poorly written they were impossible for people to read. But from the search engines point of view these blogs and links were used to increase ranking.
Like everything SEO related, once the process was fully understood as a numbers game it became a simple race for people to build links through any means necessary. Those who used this method previously could have a single blogging site could create a hundred, a thousand, or several thousand links and boost the PageRank and search engine ranking of their website.
I've explained this process so you can understand that this is not the correct method any more. Like all abused methods, the search engines eventually figured out that those large quantities of links from a single blogging site to your site was a typical indication of website spam.
Google Webmaster Tools has a report (Traffic > Links to Your Site) that shows the websites that link to you and the number of times it is linking to you. Those of you who previously paid for link building services will probably see random domain names in that report more than a few hundred links. You should probably investigate any websites in that report that show more than 1000 links because that might be hurting your ranking instead of helping.
Link building measurements of 2013 now look for the number of referring domain names instead of the quantity or links. Having inbound links from 100 different domain names (i.e. 100 different websites) is far more important than having 100 links from a single blogging website.
Blogging can be controlled and abused, but it's far less likely that someone will control 100 or more quality websites that can be used for link building. "Quality websites" is the important description there because it means real website with real content rather than machine generated content.
Here's what your goals should be for your future link building efforts:
1. Try to get links from bloggers who use Google's Authorship verification. Google trusts those bloggers.
2. Try to get links from any website that has an established history, and that you expect to be around for a while.
3. Try to get links from a diverse number of websites outside your area of business.
Overall, search engines are now looking for larger quantities of domain names to link to you. As I said above these are called referring domains.
