We all know about the importance of building inbound links, but link diversity is just as important as generating the links themselves.  And for good reason.

Better Search Rankings
Imagine that a job candidate’s references were all family members.  Wouldn’t the candidate’s references carry more weight if they were a mix of colleagues and supervisors?  The same goes for your natural link portfolio.  Inbound links are essentially ‘votes’ for your site, and a diverse link portfolio indicates authority and trustworthiness, which search engines are often happy to reward accordingly.

Conversely, search engine algorithms can tell if a significant portion of your inbound links come from one single site…and penalize your search rankings for it.

Protection For Your Efforts
As with monetary investments, putting all of your eggs in one basket is not usually the best idea.  But diversifying your link portfolio can help protect your site against search algorithm updates, the closing of sites that have linked to yours and other changes that can derail your link building efforts.

Increased Web Traffic
If your inbound links stem from a limited source, you can pump only so much water out of that proverbial well.  By varying your inbound links, your site will be exposed to a broader audience, which creates more opportunity to generate high-quality inbound links and reach potential customers.

Building quality inbound and outbound links can be challenging enough, but putting in the extra time and effort to create a natural link portfolio that consists of diverse inbound links can pay off in your search engine ranking.  In an upcoming post, we’ll go into more detail about what constitutes link diversity and how to achieve it, so stay tuned.

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