SEO 101 – #6 – Potential Red Flag Linking Strategies
This video which is video #6 in the series, discusses how to be sure the search engines don’t start to scrutinize your linking strategies. These are some potential red-flag linking strategies that could potentially harm your website’s rankings.
Transcript
Reciprocal links
Reciprocal links are links where you and another website owner have agreed to swap links to each other’s sites.
For instance, another website owner may see your website and contact you to swap or trade links. This means that they’ll place a link to your site somewhere on their site so long as you also link to them.
The search engines are easily able to determine if you are engaging in reciprocal linking strategies. Now, while they’re not “bad” per se, you do want to keep the number of reciprocal links to a minimum because these kinds of links are not considered “natural” or in other words, these are not sites that link to you freely without something in return.
Un-Wavering Anchor Text
I touched briefly before on how natural links appear to the search engines. If you remember, whenever other sites link to you they’ll use varying anchor text; anchor text such as “click here”, your website address, the name of your website, etc.
Where a red flag can appear in the search engines is when that anchor text is un-wavering. In other words, the links to your site will be so perfectly sculpted so that they all contain your specific keywords within that anchor text. The search engines know that whenever people link to you they use a variety of ways to do so. If they happen to notice that every last link that points to your site contains nothing but the keywords for that page, it will make the search engines take a closer look at your site.
The bottom line is, natural links are a mash-up of a wide variety of terms. If the search engines see that every last link they come across is written with the same anchor text, this could very well send up a red flag to the search engines and they may not rank you as well as they should.
Link Farms
Additionally, some links come from what’s called “link farms”. Link farms are websites created specifically for the sake of building incoming links to a site. If you happened to work on building incoming links to your site and came across a site that promised you “site-wide” links; which means that they’d place your link on all of the web pages on their site or you found a site willing to link to you through their “family of sites” which means that one company or individual owns a wide variety of sites that all link to one another, this will most likely get your site devalued in the search engines eyes.
Again, it’s not hard for the search engines to determine who is linking to you and what kind of neighborhood those links reside in. If Google sees that you instantly have hundreds of incoming links to your website and those links are coming from sites that have little to no value or they’re linking to one another, it will probably end up getting your site banned.
These kinds of sites have little to no content on their site and they generally don’t have a good PageRank to the site or they’ve been banned all together in the search engines. Again, you can use the Google toolbar to help you determine both of these.
While it might be tempting to take advantage of a service that gets you hundreds if not thousands of links instantly, it will actually do you more harm than good where the search engines are concerned.
Purchasing Links
Lastly you need to be especially careful of services that sell links. As website owners have become more aware that a way to a get a good listing in Google is to have incoming links to their site, it’s no surprise that countless services have popped up online that allow you to purchase links from other websites; even those that are considered “high authority” websites.
This is often tempting for a new website owner who doesn’t want to have to wait for their web pages to show up in a good spot in Google but the search engines, Google especially are very aware of these kinds of linking schemes and will penalize you if you are discovered to have purchased links for the sake of getting a better ranking. Google even states that this is in direct violation of their webmaster guidelines. You can access Google’s webmaster guidelines at (http://www.google.com/webmasters). The bottom line is, as tempting as it may be, first search out other legitimate ways to get links to your site as we’ve already discussed.
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