Link building, is it good or bad?

I was wondering what your opinion is on the folowing question: is link building good or bad for SEO on the long run?

My expectation is that it should be considered as search engine spam because those links are only there because you wanted to get ranked higher in search engines.

It is nothing more then search engine manipulation/spamming if you ask me.

However, on this forum and in a lot of SEO articles that I have read people advice others to build links in order to get ranked higher.

Is this really true? And if so, why? What value could those links hold to Google that they are not banning you for it?

I suggest that you will try a mixture of link campaigns. Active/pro-active link building ask for a link in other related sites while passive link building relies on having a great content to earn a link without even asking it.

The bottom line: If you just provide useful content to your site.
Readers will like it and provide a link to your content, while at the same time you pro-actively ask for link in other sites. This mixture approach looks your inbound link building appear natural to Google and is not bad.

Why isn't it to be considered bad? What value do those links you submit yourself hold other then to get ranked higher?

Sometimes you offer them your site and it might be useful to them in case they still do not know what benefits they can received if they link to your site. Being initiative in your marketing efforts such as building links is not that bad, providing you place links in relevant sites.

Yes, that sounds like a valid reason to build links but do you expect that you will get ranked higher by it or will Google ignore those links? So would it be good for SEO aswell?

And maybe Google is smart enaufh to know what link directories are high quality and only accept the best content websites so that a link on such sites does count, aldough you did submit it yourself.

Yeah, buying links could be classed as spam as you have not earned those links on merit. Although if you have not bought them then it is totally at the linking website's discretion whether they deem your site worth of a link or not, so where does the manipulation occur there? You are just making the other site aware of you and your content.

If you buy the links you will manipulate the search engine results, since you trick Google into believing your link is meeting the quality standards of that high quality (user generated/verified) website while in fact it is not and you are only linked there because you paid for it.

So how is Google to know your site is not as high quality as it "seems" based on your link on a high quality website? Maybe they have ways to detect it later on by taking multiple factors into account with their algorithms and they then ban you or cut the traffic/high rankings after all.

Or is there something else that will make those links valuable (to Google) so that you will not get banned for it?

Btw, I happen to own a website that received 10.000+ unique visitors from Google per day within a few months after registering the domain without any major backlinks.

Linkbuilding is good, also for the long term. 4 years ago I developed a consistant linkbuilding plan for my websites. It's a manual proces, but with some thought approach it's worth it. Since 3 years I can guarantee myself that I score the top 3 with populair dutch keywords. There are linkdirs which are less ok, but at the end it's always positive for your results in google.

Variation is the key to success.

Couldn't that be related to the quality of your website content only? Or are there websites that are better then yours and ranked lower because a lack of links?

And what pray tell is optimization, assuming it works, but an attempt at manipulating google results... any seo you do will be an attempt at "manipulating" google... if you want to count out link building because of it... well be my guest

For my dayjob I work with a site that has pretty static content. It's about generating leads, our content is unique but not that extended. So I have to work with link building techniques to score high in Google.. besides that, our competitors are not that active with SEO.
For my own site it's a combination of content and linkbuilding.. with linkbuilding you can control your keywords more, and control I like

Cute thread, but I just had to intervene.

You DO NOT get penalized or de-indexed for incoming links. No matter how poor or spammy your incoming links are, Google does not judge your website based on that. Outbounds are another story, though.

The worst that can happen with spammy backlinks is that Google can realize they're bad and stop giving you any more benefit for having them. So unless your bread-and-butter rely on irrelevant links, and you have content strong enough for people to automatically link to you, you should do just fine - manipulation or not.

Not necessarily I think, there are 2 types of SEO: Whitehat and Blackhat. True whitehat should be beneficial to the search engine and the end user by getting results in the most honest way while blackhat seo includes anything that will get you high rankings while you don't actually have to contribute to the quality of the internet but instead your wallet/website succes or anything else.

If you would think about what Google really wants I would think it is serving their users in the best way: providing the best websites most relevant to their search on top. Not websites that have more backlinks then one other. Backlinks is used to determine the popularity of a page and if you generate/build those links yourself this value (for Google) is gone.

I think Google would want websites to earn their ranking based on the quality of their content and not by generating backlinks or anything. And with content quality SEO can play a substantial role in serving the end users with your high quality content in the best way by enabling Google to index your site in the most optimum way so that everything users are really looking for can be found via Google just as they would want to.