Link Strategies Post-Mobilegeddon

Recently we’ve discussed Google’s latest update and how this might affect the way we write for websites. It’s not just content however that will be affected by this change in attitude from the Search Engine monolith. Links play a critical part in optimisation and it’s only fitting, therefore, that link strategies would come under scrutiny with an algorithm change of this size.

 

Before Google began cracking down on link schemes, the quick and easy solve for getting a website top of the search was to flood it with links. Relevancy and quality came into play, and intelligence, networking and research became necessities.

 

The Change in Link Building

The idea of the semantic web is most commonly referenced alongside what has become known as Google’s Hummingbird – the ability of the search engine to detect synonymous terms and even related meanings to both singular and long-tail keywords.

Subsequently, this state of synonymy in results has been directly applied to content; and rightly so. But I think that in this focus many website owners have missed the connection that this has to a corresponding trend in link judgement by algorithms by most SEs – that of context.

If the quality of a link from one website to another affects the latter partially based off how relevant the former site is (are they both about gardening or is one about surfing?), then it only fits that the semantic web philosophy plays a part.

And so progressing from this, the ability we can see above for one aspect of Google’s algorithm to directly affect another should probably be transferred to that of mobile UX and ranking, linking websites, and relevancy based off usability.

All that in English? Surely a website that is mobile-friendly linking to another mobile-friendly site will eventually be judged more favourable by Google than a non-mobile-friendly website linking to that same site.

 

What’s the Direct Consequence?

As we progress in this ever-enlightening age of algorithms, semantics and mobility, we need to prepare for Google to increase white-hat SEO rewards to links coming from websites it is already happy with.

For your link strategies moving forward, it would be pertinent to obtain (quality) links from mobile-friendly websites wherever possible.