Traditional link building strategy says that the number of links into your website is one of the key criteria to grabbing a good ranking in Google. It makes sense that more incoming links mean more votes of approval for your website, which must be a good thing, right?

Of course not.

As soon as this correlation was made, an army of online marketeers set about twisting the link building landscape to their favour and conning the system, grabbing links from anywhere and everywhere to boost their site.

This was not the outcome Google wanted. The goal of the search engine giant is to put the most informative and appropriate information in front of its users, and websites which fool the system are not in line with this aim.

So Google set about finding ways of tipping the balance back to good quality websites. And how does Google measure quality? One key way is to count links from influential websites – ie, those sites that Google knows are well read, informative, respected.

So the balance has changed and one link from a good quality website is worth more than lots of links from poor sites.

This link building infographic from Quaturo illustrates the point brilliantly:

So, how do we go about identifying quality websites?

This is actually much easier than it seems and common sense plays a big part. What does the site look like, how interesting is the information, how many people comment on the articles, how current is the site, how easy is it get round, have you heard of the site before?

Securing coverage on good quality sites is much more difficult – but the results are infinitely most important.