Attracting lots of high-quality inbound links to your website is essential for improving your website’s authority and search engine rankings, so it’s no surprise that link-building is one of the services that most SEO firms promise their clients.
The problem is, not all inbound links are valuable -- and some may even harm you. As we mentioned above in the J.C. Penney example, practices such as paying for links or creating link pyramids can get you punished by the search engines.
Other bad link-building practices include:
•
Email Link Prospecting – Dashing off dozens or hundreds of generic email requests to webmasters, asking them to include a link back to your website. This is the link-building equivalent of cold calling, and just as ineffective.
•
Link Trading – Offering reciprocal links to any site that agrees to place a link to your site on theirs. Although trading links between a few relevant sites in your niche can be a good strategy, simply agreeing to link to anyone who links to you is a recipe for building up hundreds of links from irrelevant or even spammy third-party sites.
•
Automated Link Building – Using software programs to automatically send link requests to websites, or to post generic comments (with a link back to your site) on a blog post. Often these are low-quality links from sketchy sites or sites that are irrelevant to your business, and search engines will discount them.
•
Rapid Link Building – Adding hundreds or thousands of links to a site that previously had a low number of inbound links, most likely through automated link-building programs. Search engines want to see natural, steady growth in a site’s inbound links. If they detect a site that’s gone from a handful of links to thousands in a short period of time they are likely to discount those links.
•
Using One Phrase for all Links – Your site should build a good mix of links pointing to different areas of your website. Creating links with diverse anchor text (the word or phrase that’s hyperlinked) is essential. Adding 100 links with identical anchor text looks like spam, and search engines will discount them.
Link building requires a careful, ongoing effort that naturally boosts your link profile. Google itself says it best: “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.”
The problem is, not all inbound links are valuable -- and some may even harm you. As we mentioned above in the J.C. Penney example, practices such as paying for links or creating link pyramids can get you punished by the search engines.
Other bad link-building practices include:
•
Email Link Prospecting – Dashing off dozens or hundreds of generic email requests to webmasters, asking them to include a link back to your website. This is the link-building equivalent of cold calling, and just as ineffective.
•
Link Trading – Offering reciprocal links to any site that agrees to place a link to your site on theirs. Although trading links between a few relevant sites in your niche can be a good strategy, simply agreeing to link to anyone who links to you is a recipe for building up hundreds of links from irrelevant or even spammy third-party sites.
•
Automated Link Building – Using software programs to automatically send link requests to websites, or to post generic comments (with a link back to your site) on a blog post. Often these are low-quality links from sketchy sites or sites that are irrelevant to your business, and search engines will discount them.
•
Rapid Link Building – Adding hundreds or thousands of links to a site that previously had a low number of inbound links, most likely through automated link-building programs. Search engines want to see natural, steady growth in a site’s inbound links. If they detect a site that’s gone from a handful of links to thousands in a short period of time they are likely to discount those links.
•
Using One Phrase for all Links – Your site should build a good mix of links pointing to different areas of your website. Creating links with diverse anchor text (the word or phrase that’s hyperlinked) is essential. Adding 100 links with identical anchor text looks like spam, and search engines will discount them.
Link building requires a careful, ongoing effort that naturally boosts your link profile. Google itself says it best: “The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community.”
No comments:
Post a Comment