Search Engine Optimization nowadays has a lot to do withbuilding inbound links to your website. Building inbound linksis a cumbersome tasks and webmasters have always been lookingfor shortcuts to do this. Webmasters buy links (as advertisingas an example) or contact other webmasters to exchange linkswith them. The need for inbound links has created a new businessopportunity in the search engine optimization industry. Theoutsourcing of link building emerged from the fact that manyinbound links mean a high search engine ranking and/or a highGoogle PageRank.
There are many different ways of building inbound links.Outsourcing this tasks can save the webmaster a lot of time butit comes with a price tag. Businesses offering to take over thelink building process often maintain and operate a large networkof domains and websites and just add 'your' link to their sites.These sites are often referred to as link farms.
Others buy links on 3rd party websites for you. They often havebuild up a portfolio of websites/webmasters they work with. Thequality of these links is often questionable and a long-termbenefit does not exist. It either continues to cost thewebmaster money to keep the links alive or his website might getpunished by Google and other search engines if the linkingwebsites are recognized as part of commercial search enginespamming. Punished means that either the link to a site does nothave any value at all or depending on the situation the sitelinked to gets removed from the search engine index (worse casescenario) if other factors are involved that lead to theconclusion that search engine spamming is going on.
Outsourcing of link building also takes away the control of whois linking to a website from the webmaster. The webmasterusually just pays for X number of links but there is no optionto have industry related websites link to his site (= increasedvalue of a link). It is also difficult to verify how many linksto a website have really been established from the serviceprovider. Another difficulty is to verify how long theestablished links are staying in place. The danger of beingover-charged is very high.
Since link building has become a profitable business opportunitysearch engines are aware of what is going on and are puttingcountermeasures in place. These are not things visible to thewebmaster or explained on the search engines website. These arefactors that are worked into the algorithm. Search engines usethe human control factor more and more often to increase thevalue of the search index. Chances are that if a webmaster usesan outsourced link building strategy that at one point thecampaign value goes south (turns sour).
Inbound link building should be an organic process that shows aslowly increasing number of links pointing to a certain website.Getting a high number of inbound links within a very shortperiod will raise a warning flag at search engines. Honestwebmasters will stay away from these tactics to avoid puttingthe success of a website at risk when there are better ways ofbuilding inbound links.
About the author:Christoph Puetz is a successful entrepreneur and internationalbook author. Examples of his search engine optimization work canbe found at http://www.smallbusinessland.com and http://www.webhostingreport.net