How dofollow backlinks will look like in 2018?

As search engines continuously change their ranking algorithms and provide new ranking updates, a lot of webmasters wonder whether they need to invest in building dofollow backlinks, or not. In the light of the last Google Penguin and Panda updates, website owners have some doubts about the power of dofollow inbound links in 2018. This article is designed to dispel all misconceptions about the power of backlinks and teach you how to build quality backlinks in this and incoming year. 

Backlinks in the eyes of search engines

Since the very beginning of search engines history, backlinks have been an integral part of their algorithms. First of all, they served to discover new content and calculate the authority of a document. However, at first, Google evaluated only the number of backlinks without paying no attention to the quality of sources from which they come. The more references a web source has obtained, the higher its authority will be in the eyes of search engines. Currently, backlinks are used for discovering the new or updated content as well as for prioritization of crawling. 

To prevent all spam activities and search engine rules violation, Google has established Webmaster Guidelines were including the best link building practices. These rules have not changed much over time. Still, any webmaster activities intended to manipulate site’s rankings are deserved to be punished with Google severe penalties. 

With an evolving of search engine optimization, more and more businesses were looking for different ways of obtaining backlinks. Webmasters tried to find short wins for obtaining higher positions on Google SERP. As a result, websites that did not deserve to rank high obtained TOP Google positions by engaging in Google Webmaster Guidelines violations. It launched a start of massive link selling and purchasing campaign on a digital market. As a result, the search engine optimization industry has broken some effective link building techniques, such as guest posting, press releases, article marketing, blog comments, social media posts, forum posts, etc. 

Currently, Google still requires to backlinks to be vouched for by the site’s owner or not pass PageRank. 

In 2012, Google established its Penguin algorithm, according to which all spammy backlinks were devalued and websites that created them were punished. The same year Google created disavow tool in Google Search Console to enable website owners to get rid of their poor quality spammy links in one click. 

As you can see from the beginning, Google’s point of view has been to avoid building links to increase ranking in search engines. A lot of inexperienced webmasters have wrongly interpreted this policy, and the link penalties resulting from this policy as “Google is against link building or link building is not worth investments anymore”. To sort things out, Google is not against backlinks. On the contrary, Google uses backlinks as a ranking criterion for any other 200 criteria. However, Google is working hard to improve users search experience. That is why Google continuously struggle against ranking manipulations to give searches only valuable websites with relevant to their queries content.