Long gone are the days when you could simply seek out backlinks by contributing to a content farm or article directory. Google’s multiple algorithm changes in the past half-decade have made this method obsolete. Today, only high-quality backlinks work, whereas links of poor quality can actually get your website deindexed in some extreme cases.

In the following, you’ll learn a few methods for building backlinks the right way in the present era. Even better, these methods are inherently scalable as the needs of your business pivot to meet the changing marketplace.

First Things First: Understand What Google (Search Engine) Wants

From the very beginning, one of Google’s mantras was to gather and “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Right off the bat, this should tell you how important site organization is – your traffic must be able to find what they’re looking for on your page, and this will be evidenced by factors such as time-on-page and bounce rate.

As pertains to backlinks, it’s clear that you should only be using links to useful websites – quality over quantity. To find such backlink partners, check out aggregate sites such as Alexa.

The Scalability Aspect of Link-Building

How, exactly, do you scale your link building efforts? First and foremost; produce GREAT content. In fact, 90% of your efforts should be in producing such content, with the other 10% going to building backlinks.

Here’s a quick example to get you to see the difference: if you have a wiki-like page that describes the benefits of an African Safari, and you receive backlinks from an article directory or content farm, then Google is unlikely to upgrade your page rank. However, if your page is so well-written that forums reference it, or you get backlinks from wikis on lions and other animals, then this can boost you up the rankings.

Use Web 2.0 Platforms

Basically, this means creating smaller versions of your blog post on sites such as Tumblr, Blogger, Wattpad, and Web Node. These have the potential to gather up secondary traffic, which will be noted by Google Search as a positive marker. If you build a robust-enough link wheel with these, you may even start gathering editorial backlinks for the highest “juice.” It’s a new age of ranking and content matters even more than in the previous era before all the updates.