Google’s gold standard of whether or not a website should be ranked well continues to change over time, but for quite a while the best method has gone unchanged… relevant backlinks from legitimate, authoritative sites. On page Search Engine Optimization and lots of great content may get your site indexed for specific keywords, but quality backlinks will drive up its rank.
Since backlinks have become a known commodity, many linking scams and services continue to pop up all over the web. Don’t be persuaded in spending the money for these services. Not only will you not improve your ranking, you may be putting your websites at great risk of being dropped from search engine indexes.
Yes, there are such things as bad inbound links.
Here is a quick list of some of the types of links you DON’T want pointing at your website. This list is not to be confused with links that simply to not pass value such as links with the rel=”nofollow” attribute.
- Don’t get links from sites that blatantly sell text links.
- Don’t buy into link farms. You may have run across a deal like, get 1000 links for $29.95 per month. Stay away from these programs.
- Stay away from popular link brokers like text-link-ads.com or textlinkbrokers.com. These brokers will sell you text links with the direct intent of influencing Google’s search results. This is a violation of Google’s Terms of Service.
- You will find users on popular webmaster forums offering to sell high pagerank links. Many of these sites are created by buying expired domains with high Google PageRank values and quickly throwing up template websites with little to no value/unique content. These sites will not maintain these PageRank values as soon as Google realizes they have changed ownership and content. There are also many ways Google can identify that these simple sites are selling links.
- Make sure your links come from US based and targeted websites if your entire target market is in the US.
- You really don’t want links created by spam software. Most of this software leaves a footprint and it is quite easy for Google to identify.
- You really don’t want links from junk websites. These are sites like affiliate sites that have little or no unique content.
- Don’t post links to spam sites relating to the three P’s (porn, pills and poker). Period.
- Avoid the temptation of posting links to a forum that the owner no longer effectively manages and that is full of spam.
- Avoid the temptation to add and publish your URL in link memes. A meme is a growing list of links that passes from one site to another for the sole purpose of sharing links and pagerank across the list of participants.
These are just ten of the types of links you don’t want, but this list is not all inclusive.
Info : Marketing Tech Blog
