Most SEO specialists know about Google's attitude towards links and how it has changed over the years.
However, Google is not the only search engine out there, and it is important that you know how different, international search engines regard the practice if you are targeting a global audience.
Here are three international search engines whose link building practices you need to be aware of.
Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia. It is firmly against black hat SEO tactics and has publically told websites that they should not buy or sell links. To discourage the practice, it has made paid links a negative ranking factor. To encourage white hat SEO tactics, it has made organic links a positive ranking factor. Yandex says that its machine learning-based algorithm can tell the difference between paid and organic links.
Baidu is the most popular search engine in China and it is also trying to fight spam on its search results. It has listed several techniques that it considers black hat SEO tactics and should be avoided, including irrelevant anchor text, links from link farms and link exchanges.
Naver is an important search engine in South Korea. Naver is quite different from most other search engines, because it is primarily focused on displaying paid listings. Spaces for organic listings are limited. It does not put any strong emphasis on link building as a ranking factor, which means that links won't improve your search ranking. Therefore, if you want to boost your website's visibility on Naver, you are better off focusing on paid search and other services provided by the search engine, such as Naver Blog and Naver Café.
I hope this has given you a useful introduction to link building on international search engines. For more in-depth information, download our free guide (link above).