Link Practices to Avoid at All Costs
We’ve written about how good links are the secret sauce in SEO, and we’ve given you the goods on how to build the best possible backlinks. The third post in this series will cover what you absolutely shouldn’t be doing as you continue to implement your link-building strategy.
The following bad link-building practices run the risk of damaging your brand and getting your site penalized in (or worse, banned from) search engine results.
1. Linking from low-authority directories — Remember to check Alexa for reputation as discussed in our SEO Gold article. Never put your website link in a fly-by-night spammy directory.
2. Spamming up a forum — Don’t ask the same question in all 14 of the forums you just signed up for, just so you can post your backlink. Don’t inauthentic in forums, posting ONLY so that you can get your link up.
3. Creating ridiculous signatures — Don’t put 25 links in your signature file, in article directories, forums, or email signatures. It’s spam.
4. Spreading “Me too” disease — A frequently popular and evil backlinking tactic is posting a “Me too!” anywhere you can on the internet (forums, blogs, etc.) simply to get your backlink on the page.
5. Spamming up blogs — This includes posting blog comments filled with keywords related to your own site, or leaving a comment which adds absolutely nothing relevant or helpful to the thread.
6. Writing fake referrals and reviews — Particularly when you are posting them with garbage (but highly searched) content on low-authority sites.
7. Submitting your link to link farms — These are sites with thousands of links that are rarely if ever organized by relevance or theme. Typically they charge you money (usually about $15) and no one will ever see your site link there. It’s a money-making scheme, and it’s about the same as throwing your money down the drain.
8. Sending out spammy link exchange emails — You’ve probably received these from time to time; they read like a bot wrote them and they offer you a spot on their link farm if you’ll put their (icky!) link on your site. Don’t participate on either side of this exchange.
9. Linking to irrelevant sites — Frequently business owners run more than one web property, and it isn’t unusual to see those sites linked together. Sometimes this is just to show that a particular business is also owned and run by the same management — which can be a trust builder in some cases. However, interlinking entirely unrelated sites just because you can serves no one, and may even work against you.
Lead generation expert at HubSpot Pete Caputa puts it this way: Don’t borrow, beg, barter, bribe, or buy your links! They’re all bad link building practices, and the potential risk to your brand isn’t worth it.
