But even though linkbuilding is a very important technique it is also in a somewhat grey area when it comes to Google’s guidelines. Google has stated that you may not actively manipulate a link profile. Therefore linkbuilding requires great care and carefulness not to make it too obvious that you’re attempting to “cheat” your way to the top of the search engine results page. Furthermore, linkbuilding can be harmful for your website if you don’t know what you’re doing. Links have varying quality, and specific strategies must be followed. If you attempt to gain as many links as possible in a short timespan without taking notice of the sender and receiver relationship you risk being penalized, which destroys one’s ranking in the search engine results page. The reason being that Google associates the different links with your website and give you a ranking based on the average value of all the links combined (with a lot of other parameters in the formula as well!). Therefore, if you have an objectively bad link profile Google will also consider the website to be of a low quality, which is shown in the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) ranking. Furthermore, with the above strategy you risk being punished very quickly as a massive increase in the amount of links shows a sign of actively manipulating the link profile.