Link Building Schemes
Yesterday we touched a little bit on link building schemes in our article on black hat SEO techniques, but since most webmasters no longer participate in spamming their own site I thought it would be best to elaborate on some link building practices that could get you into trouble.
The reason link spam is so popular is Google requires a lot of quality inbound links to your site in order for them to list you high in the rankings for any sort of competitive keyword. However, not all links are going to give you the same boost and some will even cause you to be penalized in the rankings. Let's take a look at the practices that I recommend you avoid.
1. Reciprocal Link Pages - Having a "resources" or a "links" page probably won't hurt you in the SERPs, but it's not the best way to exchange links. Google is going to stop looking at outbound links when you get past somewhere around 100 so on a single page. If you have a huge, long list of links on your page it isn't going to encourage quality sites to exchange with you. One solution is to create a resources page with a menu to additional links pages organized by subject. The problem with doing this navigational trick is it pushes all of the outgoing links to a page deeper within your site, lowering their value. This is not something "quality" sites are going to really look for.
Remedy: try exchanging links within articles and get rid of straight links page to links page exchanges.
2. Irrelevant Sites - If sites in bad neighborhoods are linking to you, it probably won't hurt your rankings. Google doesn't want to punish you for things you can't control and they don't want to give competitors a way to trash your rankings. However, if YOU are linking to irrelevant sites that's a low-quality signal in Google's eyes.
Remedy: Eliminate links pointed to sites that no longer exist. Do not link to sites that are out of your niche. Think of your user ad ask yourself "would they find a link to that site useful?"
3. Rapid Link Building - The pace at which new links point to your site can be an indicator of quality. Sites tend to add links at a natural rate. The fact that you get a whole bunch of links to your site in a short period of time isn't necessarily going to be bad for you, but it might warrant a closer look. If those incoming links are sitewide or from low-quality sites, that's a low-quality signal. If you had an article listed on the front page of Digg, you might get a lot of quality links from inside the content of big sites. Those types of links are going to give you a huge boost.
Remedy: If you are trying to build your link profile up, do so at a constant, steady pace. Getting a huge influx of links every 3-4 months and not seeing any next incoming links in between is a bad sign for your profile.
4. Not Mixing Up Your Incoming Link Anchor Text or Landing Page - If you build links naturally to your site, you will have links with different anchor text pointing to different areas of your site. People will use your site name, the actual URL, and keyword anchor text that isn't quite what you would hope for. If you build 100 links to your site all with the same keyword rich anchor text and all pointing to the home page that looks unnatural and the search engines will discount them.
Remedy: Mix up the keywords you use for your anchor text and link deep into your site.
Other tactics are not necessarily going to hurt your rankings, but could be a giant waste of your time.
1. Mass Emailing Link Partners - If you are sending off hundreds of link exchange requests to webmasters every day you are probably not going to get a great response. It's kind of like cold calling and telemarketers, nobody wants to be hassled unexpectedly like that.
If you want more natural links then do what Google recommends, "create unique, relevant content." This will give other webmasters a reason to link back to you.