Many sites owners are tempted by so-called black hat link building. While it may give your site temporary boost in rankings, it’s not a sustainable way of building the authority in your niche. Google spiders are becoming better and better at detecting, spammy, low-quality backlink profiles. Removing a Google penalty is not only costly and time-consuming but sometimes it can also be impossible to regain lost rankings.

Acquiring links in a natural way is an ideal scenario for every web owner. In practice, it means that these links are gained with no actual blogger outreach on the part of the site owner. If your website provides useful content, that people want to read, your audience will naturally link to it, or share it via social media recommending to others.

Editorial backlinks are another example of natural links valued by Google. To gain them, your content must be top notch, so that journalists and editors from high authority websites would naturally link to your articles. Natural and editorial link building are the safest methods of building up your authority (although not the easiest!).

The type of link building you should definitely steer away from are non-editorial links. Although these might be tempting because they require less effort, in today’s SEO world they are regarded as providing very little, to no benefit. Non-editorial link building involves methods such as blog commenting, posting on forums, and article directories.