Contextual link building is part of a site’s natural growth. A site’s backlinks within the context of relevant sites and relevant content is a powerful ranking factor that search engines are looking at.

Link Building

Link building is an important part of SEO. Link building is getting hyperlinks from other websites to link back to your own, an effort that, historically, has been one of Google’s factors in granting domain authority.

 

At one point, any links would do. The more links you got, the more domain authority was granted. When quality started to suffer, Google starting putting weight on anchor text, the actual text displayed as your link on a target page. Then, link building networks start to crop up and, once again, quality started to suffer. In addition to anchor text, Google now actual looks at the context of links themselves.

What is Contextuality?

In the context of SEO link building, “contextuality” refers to links that are found within the context of pages containing relevant content to the site that is being linked to. The reason that has become important is that it nullifies the act of “unnatural” link building and downgrades the power of link networks. “Natural” links are to be found on sites that are related to the site in question and will therefore always be found within context.

 

Google is able to ascertain this by looking at the keyword field surrounding the link. Google’s algorithm now is able to compartmentalize related keywords. Google would expect that a link referring a web development site would naturally contain keywords in the web development field, with keywords like “web design,” “WordPress development,” “search engine optimization,” “SEO” and other like keywords in a said space. Contextuality improves user experience and so requires that webmaster only solicit for true, context driven links back to their sites.

Natural Link Building

When the fat is trimmed away, what webmasters have left is simply natural link building efforts. One strategy that webmasters can use to fall in line with this strategy is actually to pull back on their link building. As Niel Patel has discussed, over link building can actually hurt your rankings. It never hurts to try to obtain links from quality, relevant pages by offering value and participation in the linking site, but, the reality is that natural link building occurs without effort and is part and parcel of a growing site. Webmasters who like your site and feel it has something to offer are going to link to you, whether you ask them or not. This is the type of mentality that creates successful websites.

 

The most effective backlinks are the ones found within the context of your actual site’s aim. Your goal should be to constantly put out quality, in fact, this is straight from the horse’s mouth. Google says that with quality, backlinks and thus rankings will occur naturally in its presence. This is the very essence of contextual link building.