Aug
Be Careful of Link Building Scams
Posted by
Eric Brantner
If you have Gmail, you’re probably familiar with the targeted advertisements that are constantly thrown your way every time you check your mail. Admittedly, some of these links are of great interest to me. Recently, there was one advertisement that really piqued my interest. It was an ad promising over 1,000 one way links to your website.
The ad reeked of spam, and I just had to dig deeper to find out more about it. Essentially, the site said that if you paid around $100 per month, you could get all the free links you want.
From what I understand, the way it works is everyone submits their website to this directory. Businesses then go through the directory and choose the sites they want inbound links from. To those who don’t know better, this seems like a great way to build backlinks quickly and easily.
But there are several things wrong with this link exchange system.
- Quality of Links- I’ll take 10 high quality links over 1,000 bargain basement links every time. It’s not the number of links that’s so important. Quality trumps quantity nearly every time. It’s fairly safe to assume that the links on this website aren’t from high quality sources. If you’re a site with lots of trust from the search engines, you probably wouldn’t feel the need to sign up for a link exchange scam. No, the websites in this link building directory are more likely low quality, spammy pages trying to take shortcuts.
- Link Relevancy- The relevancy of your inbound links is another important factor in determining how effective they are. A site with a bunch of random, irrelevant websites linking to it looks a bit suspicious. It screams “I’m trying to manipulate the search results†to the search engines. Furthermore, irrelevant links send irrelevant traffic to your site. A quality link will send targeted, quality visitors to your website who are more likely to become customers.
- Paying for Unnatural Links- The bottom line of this advertisement is you are paying for links. Paying to have people link to your website is dangerous and a poor link building strategy. The best links are those you acquire naturally from having great content that people want to link to. Always focus on natural link building, and you’ll be better off for it.
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good info dangers of link building and how to ensure quality, thanks
It seems like every other email I get now is some sort of spam like the one you just described. I wonder how many people can actually be falling for this kind of thing? If it is not some spam about a new way to get tons of links it is something else.
Thank you for the article. I’m building links for my company’s website. I often see emails offering link building services in my Inbox. I’ve never used any of them. I like to see that link building process is under my control and make sure that I get the links from quality, relevant sites only. Of course, link building takes time but it’s better to get 10 quality links than 1,000 poor ones. Quality over quantity is the rule here.