There is no doubt that link building is one of the best ways of attracting search engine attention. As such, business owners are more than willing to invest time, effort and even resources in purposeful link building activities. But link building is not just acquiring as many links as possible no matter where they come from and how they were acquired.

A healthy link profile is needed by websites to be recognized and ranked high in the results pages of reputable search engines. A link profile is the totality of all inbound links that are received by a website. A healthy link profile is composed of links coming from diversified sources like other websites and social media. It is a sound, balanced and an ideal combination of links from legitimate sources that are not manipulated or faked just to come up with high numbers.

If techie experts are to be believed, search engine algorithms now factor in quality not just quantity of links when ranking websites. The quality of a link can be determined by the kind of source it came from and the frequency of receipt. For instance, it would be unnat
ural for a website to be receiving hundreds of links in a few days and very minimal or none at all during the rest of the month. If there is no continuity and consistency of incoming links, search engines may perceive this to be spamming and, thus, disregard such links.

The sources of links can also be determined by search engines. If they see some diversity of sources and not just a couple of IPs, they will count such links as quality links and increase the website's chances for higher rankings. But if the bulk of links come from sitewide sources like different URLs of the same IP, such links are given little importance by search engines. Search engines also ignore links that come from thousands of sites of a single SEO network. This is unsound and unnatural because it does not reflect the true value of the website.

A healthy link profile is a good balance between quality and quantity and it does not come as a miracle. Link building is a gradual process of establishing credibility because credibility is earned, not imposed. Good old quality content is still the best way to show that you are an expert in your field, a good reason why customers should trust you and buy from you.