If your website doesn’t have incoming links then it becomes very difficult to get ranked high on the top search engines. The entire premise of SEO is based on building links. One quality incoming link to your website makes the top search engines look at it in a favorable manner. However, link building has become terribly hard because Google has put in multiple restrictions through its frequent updates.

SEO companies talking negative about Google has now become clichéd. The fact that Google is the largest search engine in the world and everyone has to comply with its demands. As of now nothing can be done other than doing all those things that Google wants websites to do. Hence, if Google wants link building to be done in a specific manner you have to do it that way. On hindsight this is probably good. If you are following what Google mandates your website brand image definitely gets a boost.

What is important is that you are aware of those spammy linking techniques. This is what has been discussed below.

Buying links is now illegal practice as far as Google is concerned. Since the Penguin update was released in 2012 Google has come down hard on those websites that buy and sell links. In recent news some of the Polish websites have been targeted by Google because these websites are in the business of selling links.

Relevancy is another important aspect of modern link building. You are free to exchange links with other websites as long as they belong to your niche. If you deal in gemstones and you are building links with a website that deals in shoes then it has no value as per Google. Not only that you stand to be penalized when Google finds out what you have been up to. And don’t worry, Google is bound to find out sometime or the other.

Until recently blog posting and guest blogging were considered great for link building but not anymore. Spammers so much abused these practices that Google now says that these ways of building links will be considered as spamming. As far as guest blogging is considered Matt Cutts clearly mentioned that only if you are posting in blogs of people that you personally know that would be considered as ethical.

Finally, Google has also put a stop on the use of automatic link builders. These are software applications that can help you build links. You will even see a spike in your website PageRank score for a few days. But the fact is that this process of building links is all about spamming forums and blog comments section. And again Google will not let this practice go unnoticed.

Think of link building as a brand building exercise. Brand building takes a lot of hard work and hard work is what you need to do to build links for your website. Follow the natural ways of building links and Google will reward you. Follow anything else and you will be penalized.

Resource Box: ( http://www.link-building-strategies.com/ ) Link building has to be natural. If you use unethical ways of ( http://www.link-building-strategies.com/SEO-maintenance-packages.html ) building links you are bound to get caught sooner or later.