If a person was looking for content marketing tips before the Google Panda update, the most likely response would be: more external links.
But the Google search engine has become more sophisticated with the Panda update, now more effectively judging the quality and content of your external links. In this new reality, you need to modify and update your link building techniques in order to market your content more effectively.
The Problems with Automated Link Building
Automated link building is effectively the shotgun approach to link building. You fire hundreds of virtual “bullets” into the internet and hope that a few of them hit. And while this does result in external links for you content, it does nothing to assure those links will actually improve the SEO of your website.
In fact, one of the major ways that the Panda update changed content marketing is that it is now possible for an external link to decrease the SEO of your website, if that link is to a site that has no meaningful connection to your site or is a link farm.
Since the traditional automated link building methods can now potentially hurt the SEO of the content you are marketing, these techniques must be discarded completely.
Conduct Human Link Building
In today’s environment, the best answer to that hypothetical person’s question about content marketing tips is: content appropriate external links. While the full extent of the Panda update is still something of a mystery, some things have become very clear.
First, meaningful content is critical to good SEO. One of the main ways Google confirms that content is meaningful is by comparing site content of external links. If they are related, then the content is more likely to be useful to readers.
Additionally, external links from highly rated site improves the rating of your site. What this means when link building is you want links from sites with high quality, appropriate content.
Instead of spamming for links, take a personal approach. This means that you need to offer unique and specialized content to your link partners and should send personalized queries. This is more time consuming, but like the parable of the turtle and the hare, slow and steady actually wins this race.
