4 bad ways for link building which could harm your SEO effort
Jack on October 27th, 2009There are right ways and wrong ways for link building to your website. Using black hat SEO tactics may deliver great results to your website on the short run, but you can never benefit in the long term by using these SEO techniques. Websites that use black hat SEO tricks will eventually be caught and removed from search engine indexes, face possible government investigation and loose trust with its visitors. The following post will help you identify which techniques will bring a bad light upon your website. So try to avoid following link building techniques and always adopt good Link Building techniques for SEO.
1. Forum Spam
Forums are used around the web for users to hold long term discussions about numerous topics. Because forums are a great way to share information and links, companies offer services to include your links on various forums but incorrectly by spamming. Posting your links on forums for the sake search engine optimization and receiving a back link to your website is bad way to gain links and will mark your website as a spammer.
2. Blog Spam
Much like forum spamming, spamming blogs with links to your sites are is a sure fire way to be marked as a spammer and will lead to punishment from the community and search engines. Blogs use comments for discussion, not for an easy way to gain a free link to your website. Practicing correct blog commenting will help you avoid the mistake of building untrustworthy back links to your website, thus hurting your SEO efforts.
3. Stealing Content
Stealing website content will forever be a great no-no for your website. Search engines do not reward websites that have exact content and in fact may punish these websites by removing them from search engine indexes or ranking them lower on search results. You should feel free to create round-up posts of various website content, but you should never completely copy what others have done.
In order to get top ranking you must get unique content written from a good content writing provider.
4. Link Exchanges and Directory Submissions
When your website gains thousands of back links within a short amount of time, your website will be flagged. Websites will build back links naturally through their community or social networking. However, submitting your website to link exchange and directory submission services that post your website link to thousands of directories will harm your search engine optimization. You may see a short term boost in traffic, but search engines are sophisticated enough to know when websites are using illegal practices.
If you want to avoid getting banned for directory submission then you should to natural, organic and 100% manual directory submission which will guarantee you top ranking.
There are many different ways to gain quality back links, but using black hat SEO tactics are not the correct way to do gain them. Avoiding the trap of spamming, stealing content and mass link submission will make sure that you participate with the web community is a safe way. Instead of using these black hat services, link building naturally to avoid the long term punishment to your search engine optimization.
Recently a client of mine went out and hired an “SEO Expert” to create backlinks for his site. When checking backinks to his site a month later I found that all he was really doing was creating profiles on various forums, (some of which have nothing to do with the subject/keywords of my client’s site), and linking back to my client’s site.
This fellow wasn’t posting any articles or useful comments to go with the profiles, just the profiles themselves.
What is your opinion of this backlink tactic. Does it fall under the category of “Blackhat” SEO? Is there any risk that my client’s site will get “slapped down” from this practice. I advised him against it and suggested that actually publishing helpful articles on related boards with a link in his signature box would be a much better way to go in the long run. Did I advise him correctly?
Thanks for your time,
-TIM
[Reply]
Creating profile and adding links on various forums are not as effective as writing articles and getting links from there. However they are not a bad idea as long as you don’t try to spam it.
Creating profile on unrelated forums is bad practice. Link from relevant forum might not harm.
A ghost profile on forums with no participations in forum is useless too.
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