Thinking about ways to improve your website SEO factor through linking? There are lots of good ways and lots of bad ways. Here are 7 SEO-damaging linking tactics to avoid at all costs:
1. Rapid link building. Building too many links, too fast, is a surefire way to fall under the ever-discriminate eyes of the search engines. Keep it real to avoid being tagged as a fake.
2. Swipe file linking. Doing link exchanges and other link building techniques is great—but avoid using the same anchor text links pointing to the same pages of your site over and over. A more varied, natural, and diverse backlink strategy should have better results.
3. Meaningless blog commenting. If you don’t have something productive to say on someone else’s blog, it’s best not to say it at all. Search engines and blog owners are both a lot smarter than they were 5 years ago. Blog commenting as a link strategy only works well when you’ve become an active participating member of the community and leave your link within comments only by the rules.
4. Forum spamming. Same goes for leaving forum comments with links to your site as it does for blog commenting. It used to be super effective, but once it became clear that people were only doing the comments to be self-serving, the forum community and search engines got much wiser.
5. Link farming. Avoid posting your links on directory sites or link farms that clearly are in existence only to support SEO linking. If they don’t offer any value to their human visitors, they’re probably considered link farms by the search engines—and being listed on a designated link farm will damage your ranking.
6. Blatantly paying for backlinks. It’s not a very good idea to be associated with a website that’s known for selling links solely to improve link weight. While most advertising is fair play, there’s a fine line here in what the search engines consider “frowned-upon” or not. If you’re thinking about buying backlinks, it’s probably best to talk to SEM pros like WSpider first to determine the pitfalls and avoid going down the wrong path here.
7. Refusing to place an outgoing link. Sites that have tons of links pointing in to them, but very few (if any) natural outgoing links leading their own visitors to helpful resources are likely to be negatively impacted by the search engines if suspicion is raised. It’s natural for truly popular sites to have a balanced incoming and outgoing link profile.
BONUS TIP: Avoid search engine spam. Keep your efforts above the line at all times, with a visitor-first mindset. Anything done sheerly for obtaining traffic alone is likely to be considered search spam. If you’re doing it to help you visitors, chances are good that it’ll help your SEO too.
