Many webmasters will tell you roughly how much money they have spent on SEO or on buying backlinks. Whether it be a newbie solo-preneur enthusiast with one or two websites they want to build backlinks to or whether its a big organization that wants to build x amount of whatever type of backlinks to whatever page/site/link in order to increase that page/site/links position in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). But when you think of “build backlinks” what do you think of?

To many people, building backlinks can mean a variation of things; from building article backlinks with the use of Article Marketing Sites. To building Social Bookmark Backlinks with Social Bookmarking sites to Link Directory Submission, Blog Commenting, Forum Posting to Social Networking on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest etc etc. And there are many other backlink building opportunities to take advantage of online.

Building backlinks can mean either getting your hands dirty and doing it yourself. Or outsourcing the job to someone else. Personally as a webmaster I do both. And as someone who wants to speed things up I do both manual and automatic link building I am not ashamed to say. Because by “automatic link building” I mean using what some people can call “black hat software” but the term is something that can be frowned upon by some people in the SEO/IM world. But lets face it; 99% of people in the SEO/IM world probably use black hat SEO tools to some extent anyway. But the way I see it is just speeding up something you’d have to do manually otherwise! Is that cheating? I don’t believe that it is. Let me digress for you..

Article Backlinks

Lets say I want to do some article marketing to get my articles published that will get posted to the top major article directory sites like EzineArticle, GoArticle, ArticleDashboard, ArticleFriendly etc. There are hundreds of these sites! Should I post my article manually by hand to all of them? Would it really be cheating or considered “blackhat” if I employed a “helper” (in the form of an article submission bot) to post my articles to these sites automatically?

Web 2.0 Backlinks

Also lets say I want to extend my sites online presence and build backlinks with Web 2.0 blogging sites like WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, Squidoo, TypePad, Tumblr Webs and Wikispaces etc etc. Well I’d have to create accounts on all these sites individually by hand one at a time. Now this is expected by Google as a matter of course surely but again, would employing a helper or employee in the form of a robot software make me a cheater and or a blackhat?

The same can apply for many types of backlink building opportunities. Consider Link Directories. It’s considered good to submit to “human edited” link directory sites because Google likes humans as opposed to all those low value auto approve link directories. But would using a link directory submission bot with big list of link directory sites to submit to them so I can free up my time for more important issues like my friends and family make me a bad person?? Go ahead and feel free to tell me if it does.

I don’t think anyone is saying that it does or that I am because I use robots or software to repeat mundane, boring repetitive tasks online like link building for the purpose of increasing my sites rank in the SERPS. If you create a new site, build some backlinks to it through these methods and it does really well and you earn a small fortune from it then good on you. So long as you are providing quality content to your sites and what you are submitting and are paying your taxes on your new income. You are considered a wise and good person and no one need know any better right?