Tame Your Little SEO Devil - Link Building by the Book
Who wants to be sitting day and night looking for other sites who will agree to put a link pointing to your site? And if your site is totally new, with no Google PageRank and little traffic? I know how slowly it works at the very start - you either get no replies at all, or your link requests get rejected. Patience is your #1 weapon so far. Well patience, patience, all needs time - that’s what beginning SEOs hear daily. Still the little devil inside says “get as many links as you can, and the sooner the better.”
How often an SEO will be looking around (in the quiet… hush), searching for easy ways. Nothing to be ashamed of, we’re just humans. Let’s just see why your restless little SEO devil can be dangerous, and how to fight him. Or in plain language, why you shouldn’t grow your links too fast?
Google and company want to rank sites due to their “natural attractiveness”. In theory, you should have valuable content, and other sites will link to you naturally, because your site can bear extra value for their own users. If this happens, in most cases this won’t happen overnight. Except for rare cases that I’ll discuss in my future articles, people won’t come to your site in hundred-thousand flocks. They come one by one, giving you several links a day. And this looks natural to Google. Mmmm how many times did I write natural? You think that’s a bad writing habit? Nope. Just the word “natural” is key here. Links must be built at a natural speed.
Now let’s see what’re the most common traps where a newbie is lead by the ever-in-a-hurry SEO devil.
Trap #1: Free For All (FFA) sites
These are pages with the sole purpose of listing links. Practically anyone can post their “ad” on these pages for free.
Why they’re attractive? - For a young site to whom nobody wants to link, that’s a good chance to get a link quickly, without the fear of rejection.
Why they’re armful? - Because the owner of the site doesn’t monitor the link submissions, this can mean thousands of links to some very undesirable content. Here comes the notion of bad neighborhood. When a link to your innocent site about baby oils gets surrounded by links to porn, gambling and Cialis sites, Google may decide you all keep each other company. Because of bad neighborhood you can get an adverse effect with this link. A drop in rankings. Ouch.
Trap #2: Link farms
These are groups (or rather networks) of webpages who link to one another without being even thematically relevant. They are very close to the Free For All sites.
Why they’re attractive? - Your site links to a “link farm” page, and you automatically get several thousand incoming links.
Why they’re harmful? - Firstly, due to being interlinked with thousands of low-quality site, you can easily lose in rankings. Secondly, search engines are very strict to link farms and may even penalize a site linking to a link farm site.
Trap #3: Automated directory submissions
Most site owners will submit their URLs to Web catalogues, or directories of sites, getting links, and hoping to be found by the directory’s user one day.
Why they’re attractive? - Submitting your site into relevant categories of Web directories is a good way to get links and some traffic.
Why they’re harmful? - If you speed up your work with some auto-submission software (and get hundreds of links almost simultaneously), this may seem suspicious to Google. Result: you have a slight drop in search engines rankings, or you’re totally excluded from Google results for several days, until it has more time to look at you closely.
Find out how to speed up your link building legally and naturally with the industry’s most powerful tools. Get more SEO tips from search engine optimization experts.
Posted: November 17th, 2008 under Uncategorized.
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