There is a lot of buzz about link building all over the web. And the term and its significance in SEO changes on each site you dive in. The real question that most of the newbies worry about is how really important this link building is in a SEO campaign.

What if we don’t do it?
Will it prevent us from ranking well in search engines?

This list is quite long.

There is no doubt link building is an important part of SEO. However, that does not mean you will not secure good rankings if you don’t “exclusively” work on link building for your website. The reason being that, if you have good content, people will be compelled to link to your website and you will acquire links naturally without exclusively working on it.

Time to dive in.

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Most of you newbies in the field of search engine optimization have experienced this. When you are new, it is really difficult to find the correct information in such a large volume of seo related information available online, specially when you want it for free :). To add to it, mostly incorrect. I have myself experienced this. Most seo bloggers fill up their blogs with information relating seo without giving much regard to its validity and correctness, just to pile up the volume of information in their blogs that they often believe would help them get good search engine rankings.

I recently read this post where Aaron Wall of SEOBook takes up the issue.

Link popularity is still the trump card for gaining higher PageRank and will remain so, at least for a foreseeable period. To gain high PR, many webmasters get involved in buying high PR links from other websites. No doubt this hurts the relevancy of search engines. Matt Cutts writes on this topic in his blog here with an excellent illustration of the topic.

He explains with an example, how seriously paid links can hurt a user’s objective of using search engines.

I do agree with Matt over this. Paid reviews and links definitely hurt the quality of index maintained by search engines and add a lot of irrelevancy in our search results. However, this is the guideline that Google has itself violated, repeatedly.

Aaron Wall, writes in his blog, how Google has been caught repeatedly selling high PageRank links. See here and here. Google has been cross promoting products with high PR links from its sites.

They set the guidelines and violate those guidelines themselves.

And as Aaron says,

“If Google does something like that it is a co-brand cross promotion, and all is well. If I do something like that it is an attempt to manipulate Google and/or a spammy link buy.”

I agree with him, unless Google corrects it.