Perform a quick search on an engine of your choice and you’ll find thousands of references to ‘link building’.
Now before we get too deep into this post, I want to point out that I am all in favour of “getting the word out” on the Internet, and I am equally in favour of earning links where they are due. I’m also in favour of exchanging relevent links for traffic purposes (note: if you think link exchanges are any use for search engine promotion, you need to do some serious reading).
Deliberately seeking links for the purpose of ‘link building’, however, has a serious number of flaws. Read on and you’ll discover why.
Link building is a superb money spinner because the demand is enormously high, but it’s unfortunate too many people are willing to fall for the sales pitch: “you need links, loads and loads of links from all over the place”. It’s true, you do need links, but rather you need good links (that’s one-way links from high quality sites). ‘Link building’ in the spammy sense can rarely provide this.
What many don’t realise is that most of these links will be of no real benefit, especially in the long term. Link builders will submit to numerous directories, despite the fact you can count on one hand the number of ‘quality directories’. Link builders often attempt to set up link schemes purely for search engine gain, and they’ll probably make the critical mistake of attempting to get a link on a competing site (great way to tip them off about your marketing exploits!)
What else might a link builder do?
Set up link exchanges – A link exchange with a related site is not forbidden but will it help you THAT much in terms of rank? No. Here’s why: it is unnatural, so search engines will not give you any credit for those links. It may help to send targeted traffic to your site, but if a ‘link building’ maverick has anything to do with it, that’s unlikely to be true!
Remember: Outbound links should be to sites worthy of a link and they should enhance a visitor’s experience to your site and provide them with additional reading material related to the topic.
Create an article and submit to trashy ‘article directories’ – Waste of time. It will let a search engine know you’re there, but offer little other benefit. Who reads these poorly researched, spam-ridden articles anyway?
Try to utilise social media sites – The intention here is to obtain links to increase your ranking, but since most social sites are ‘no follow’, they provide no benefit anyway. Social sites are not stupid, they know what’s going on, and the Big G does, too. You can use these sites to establish a following on the network in question, but not for any real link juice.
Blog commenting – Any blog worthy of a link has ‘no follow’ enabled for comments. If you find a ‘do follow’ blog, don’t get too excited. Blogs that allow the crawling of links are usually spam infested, and as such they are worthless. Every other spammy link builder in the land will have had the same idea as you. Be wise and write an informative article for your site instead!
Remember: Don’t associate yourself with spam, associate yourself with clean, safe sites.
Buying links - They might buy links with the intention of manipulating rankings – another big NO NO!
PageRank boasting - Somewhere along the line, they will attempt to earn your approval by boasting about how much your “PageRank” has risen. I am not even going to begin explaining what’s wrong with this.
Remember: The site with the most links does not automatically rank higher. This is a myth and it depends on numerous other factors as well. The quality of many links derived from ‘link building’ are worthless to poor in most cases. In addition, toolbar PageRank has NO direct impact on your ranking.
Are you beginning to see the problem? Search engines view all these methods as UNNATURAL, and will most likely penalise sites using their algorithm. In extreme cases an outright ban could be in order!
So what’s the best way to get links? Here’s how: You earn them, pure and simple. The problem I find is that so many people have ‘chasing links’ engraved in their mindset. It’s longer, it’s harder, but natural linking pays off. Well I didn’t say it was going to be easy, did I?