I’ve seen lots of SEO companies offering link building services and some of them claiming they are white-hat SEOs. I’d like to explain why link building campaign is never white hat SEO. It’s always in some gray area and often completely black hat.
If you want to receive backlinks that are totally white hat, you can’t:
- Buy links
- Beg for links
- Spam or place them on your own in any other way
Basically, you can’t create backlinks that will influence rankings in any non-natural way. This means that only thing you can rely on is your marketing activity. A good white hat link building campaign is actually not link building campaign at all, we’re talking about inbound marketing techniques, content marketing or link bait to be more precise.
Imagine backlinks as your reputation. You need others to respect you in order to increase your reputation. Voting for yourself a lot of times will not help in the eyes of others, they still need to respect you on their own.
No company can ever guarantee you a certain number of links you will receive and call themselves white-hat SEOs. If you can guarantee a certain number of links you are obviously manipulating search engines and you are not doing white-hat SEO.
If any off-site SEO activity is going to be white-hat, it has to rely on your content and ability to gain natural backlinks. So if you can’t literally build links, you can’t do a link building campaign. It’s pretty simple.
