Avoiding Bad Link Building Methods

Google’s ranking algorithm has changed overtime and the importance of links has decreased in search engine rankings compared to 10 years back. Back then, Google algorithm was synonymous with PageRank. Today, Google does not even update the page rank score. Yet, the links to a site are an important aspect of rankings even though 200 parameters are believed to affect search rankings. Good link building can translate into higher rankings in Google whereas a site with poor links can will lag behind in the competition. Good links not only bring in more web traffic to your website but also promote the growth of your business.

Why is It Important to have Good Web Promotion for Your Business?

Promotion and sales are both important aspects of any business. Some businesses especially beverage companies like Coca Cola and Pepsi continuously promote their brands regularly using TV commercials, web ads, in-store displays, bill boards etc to both remind and encourage purchase. Other consumer brands like Walt Disney are very meticulous in how their brand is being used. Today we see many toys, clothing and kids bags branded with Disney. They set high standards for quality and looks for the products branded with Disney logo.

Similarly, ad campaigns for major brands go through multiple levels of checks before being released into the market. They employ the most talented and quality conscious professionals to engage and promote their products. Small and medium business clients including B2B companies should be careful about who is doing their web promotion as there is a tendency of many firms to take the project and then outsource it to a low quality providers for peanuts. As they say, if you pay peanuts you hire monkeys. They may have limited skill and capability to implement effective strategies to promote the website. It is kind of risky to work with such low quality providers because they utilize spammy SEO methods to quickly boost up the links pointing to a site. The site may initially even get some traffic but eventually it may lose its credibility in search engines with negative ranking points.

Mentioned below are some of the poor ways of promoting website through link building and the problems associated with deploying similar methods:

Problems Using Automated Software

Websites using automated link building often does not score well in search engine rankings. Though it is the faster process to create large amount of links, it is risky to use for businesses. Quality is the main thing that you need to compromise while using automated tools as these tools are not effective in building quality links. If quality of the submissions are poor, there is less possibility of ranking well in search engines. Moreover, some good sites do not prefer requests from automated tools and even restrict websites that make such attempts for submissions.

Wrong Belief ‘More is Good’

There is a wrong understanding that having more number of external links to the website help to rank well in search engines. It is not the quantity but the quality of links that adds value to the site. A link coming from a trusted and relevant website carry more value than a bunch of bad links coming from low quality domains. Good quality links impact website’s performance in search engines in a positive way whereas bad links can have negative impact on site rankings.

Build Irrelevant Links

In order to gain high link profile for their websites, people do not pay much attention to where the links are coming from. Relevancy is very important in determining link quality as links coming from the site not related to your website doesn’t add much value to your site’s credibility. Links coming from websites having similar resources, or aligned with your niche or general theme of your website look more relevant and natural.

Lack of Link Research Skills

SEO is hard and complex that requires knowledge, skill, patience and time. Link building requires lot of hard work and research skills to identify the websites of decent quality from where you can build links to your site. You cannot expect these things in a low quality provider and simply handover the responsibility of your website promotion into their hands. They cannot adapt to the ever-changing rules of search engine algorithms and have limited ability to work on SEO strategies.

Inability to Assess Link Quality

Identifying sites that can provide backlinks and evaluating their quality is very important to deliver better site rankings. Many times, people mechanically do work without any knowledge of google guidelines or unable to judge the site against it. They have poor judgment on aspects like which links to pursue and which to give up. Assessing the link for quality is a complex thing and involves multiple layers of evaluation for relevance, authority and trust.

Lack of Best Practice Mindset

Link building best practices depend on many variables and also vary based on website’s goal. The methodologies followed by low quality providers rarely deliver positive outcome to the websites. Generally, they either adopt cookie cutter methods or follow some new strategies that may not adjust to the algorithm changes. The low quality providers typically use mechanical or generic methods because they have limited understanding or ability to make judgment on SEO best practices.

By: Uma Sri