Published on May 25, 2012 Link building strategies that are a waste of time
Recently, Google has actively released a new ranking formula known as the “Penguin” update designed to reward certain types of websites and devalue the links from others. As links can play an important part in the ranking of a website, the question of how to go about building links is more important than ever. What’s more a senior search engine strategist at Microsoft has published an article suggesting that Bing is heading in the same direction by calling for business owners to stop waiting for their rankings to go back up and to “get religion”, by changing their whole strategy for building a quality website.
The upshot of these policy and tactical initiatives is that while link building will continue to be an important part in search engine marketing moving forward, not all links are equal and there are some link building strategies that you are just wasting your time doing: even if they have been successful for you in the past. What are some of the no-nos of link building for your online shop?
Some strategies to avoid are:
- Buying “link blasts” of the type “we’ll submit you to 10,000+ search engines”. These are advertised all over the Internet in low quality foreign blogs as well as in the many spam messages you’ll probably receive as a store owner every day. If it’s easy for you to see it’s a paid link, it’s easy for Google and Bing to see it too.
- Paying foreign freelancers to submit your site to hundreds of social bookmarking websites that are probably not even indexed on the Internet.
- Submitting your site to a whole lot of irrelevant directories that aren’t relevant to Australia or your business. If it’s a quality well established directory that’s very different from a “fly by night” directory produced by a search engine company
- Buying “link scraping” software that will give you a huge list of blogs that you can put automated comments in to. Blog comments with links back to yourself are still a valid strategy provided the site is a quality website, and the topic or site is relevant to yours. But you must read the article and put in a real comment. “Thanks for a good article. I really liked it”, doesn’t really add value to the article. Say something meaningful and relevant to the article, add to it or comment on an alternative. Don’t just comment on blogs of your competitors saying “hey check out my product instead”. They’ll just delete your comment or not approve it.
- You may be starting to see a theme, quantity link “blasts” are not going to cut it any more. You need links from real people.
- Paying for low quality “spun” articles that don’t read like a human even wrote them let alone make any sense. If you wouldn’t read the article in an industry magazine for your business, then it’s not good enough to be used. You’re much better off building a name for yourself as an authority in your industry and writing guest articles for blogs.
- Using the same link text on every link that you do get. This was previously industry practice of search engine companies to build ranking on a particular search phrase – now it’s seen as “unnatural linking” by search engines. Never go above 60% of your total links to your site from the entire Internet (of quality, indexed websites) or else you run the risk of being considered as link spam.
- Random Link exchanges and link wheels (where A links to B, B links to C and C links to A) should be a thing of the past unless you have a particular reason for a link between businesses (e.g. you are partner companies or have a supplier/retailer type relationship). If you are doing link exchanges for generic industries then the search engines will start to see this as an unnatural attempt to build links. Your links need to be related not random. This is not to say that you can’t exchange links between yourself and another firm, but only do it if it’s relevant for your customers and useful.
- Low quality press release blasts. Press Releases are a useful way of getting your message out there, and act as a backlink if kept in archives. But the press release website needs to have credibility and actually be read by journalists. Otherwise it’s not a press release, it’s a scatter-blast.
- Reciprocal Link switching should also be avoided. That’s where you submit your site to another one and they review the content of the page that will be linking to them and as soon as they have provided the link you change the content on the page to something else that you really want to promote. Search engines check for this kind of thing, and so do webmasters. Link only to your business associates and partners, not to random people who could rip you off in an instant.
These new changes make the importance of social networking in its real sense more important – the more associations and linkages you have with others, the more likely they will be to read what you have to say, interact with it and respond or link to you. The search engines are trying really hard to bring back to old phrase from the offline publishing age: Content is king.
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