Search engines are sometimes good at discriminating link quality. They tend to favor websites with strong foundations and well-travelled credentials. And when you start to outsource to pave way for cheap link building in order to save money, what you often get is automated junk which is thrown off target, way off target. And this results to problems starting with potential bad publicity, frequent exchange of irrelevant topics; it will likely decrease the links of quality resources on a particular topic in your website, in this case it may cost you some of your current quality links. Also, if your site and other sites are unconsciously trading way off topics it would most probably mean that both your link popularity rests at the bottom of the link spam. What results from all these is that a normal, well-trusted link profile begins to unfold and will look abnormal instead. You can only expect that bad publicity or those low-quality links will catch up with your site and the result will either get you filtered out of the search results or worse, your site will be banned. If your website is easily accessible and reproducible by your competitors for a cheap price, it might be time to move on. But don’t close the shop. There are always other ways.

Because your site, together with all the other existing sites needed these inbound links to function properly and effectively, as these links are considered the currency in the web, search engines will then start to determine how to rank your page over the others. They look for that particular quality, some indication that your product page for example, is more “valuable” than other competitor’s page. But what’s more important is how you show that your product page is far better than that of the competitor’s product page. One good way to do that is to get good links to your product page.

So, how do you direct these inbound links favorably to your site’s direction? Create content. Articles, videos and photos are assets; create these contents and publish it on other websites, or even on your own blog and create links to it. Be aggressive in maintaining social networking accounts. You can do this by bookmarking, or by tweeting. Google takes care that it monitors activities on most social networks, except Facebook unfortunately. And it is perfectly aware of the links on them. When you create content and linked them to your product pages, and presenting them to busy networking sites, you’re already creating links which will finally stamp your main objective, elevate your search engine rankings. And your dividends will start to pay. You will get attention.

Cheap building links are very real alright. But it will only get you nowhere. These low cost strategies are just limited in scope, while high value link campaigns such as those mentioned above take a lot of money and effort to implement. In the end, you still have a brand to protect. So think again.