A large part of SEO is link building or link earning. How SEOs build links has changed quite a lot in the last year mainly due to Google’s Penguin Update.
Here are Some Link Building Techniques to Avoid
Mass Blog Commenting
A pretty obvious one although I’ve seen sites doing this up until the present day. This involves companies using automated software to crawl blogs and leave general comments. These links are of no value and having a large proportion is a clear indication that you are practicing manipulative SEO techniques.
Fake Profiles
This one is where multiple profiles are created on forums and other sites under a fake name with a link back to your site. Again, these are easy to spot and could leave you wide open.
Article Spinning
This will sometimes be disguised by some companies as Article submissions. What they are doing though is using 1 article to submit multiple times and this is definitely regarded as dirty.
Exact Match Anchor Text
This is probably the most obvious sign that a site is building links artificially for SEO purposes only and the main reason a lot of sites got hit with a penalty last year. If you don’t have a natural use of anchor text throughout your link profile you could be vulnerable too. A good rule of thumb is to that about half of your links use branded anchor text, another 25% a mixture of branded and keyword focused and the remaining 25% long tail anchor text with only a few links using exact match.
Link Exchanges
Link exchanges are OK with a few genuine partners. It’s when you have massive list of unrelated sites on a ‘links’ page that things get a bit dodgy. This was a popular technique years ago when I started SEO and still works in a few industries today (Look at some hotels in the Irish market to see examples of this). For most industries I’d only use this in very small measures if at all.
Site Wide Links
A site wide link is a link that appears on every page of a site. The most common form of these are footer links or blogroll links. These can be regarded as a warning sign for poor quality links because they are often generated as part of a link exchange. I wouldn’t worry about a few of these but I wouldn’t like to be over reliant on them either. The main thing is that they are not poor quality, irrelevant links that could lead to a manual penalty. A few genuine, natural site wide links are nothing to worry about.
So What’s the Alternative
There are still link building methods you can use instead of the methods listed above. Some of the most popular link building methods are writing guest blog posts, press releases, good quality directories, taking part in conferences and events, and using genuine relationships with clients, suppliers and other partners.
