10 ways your Backlinks can work against you

[wordpresstrainingpackage]

NOTE: I am sharing the techniques that have worked for me as an internet marketer. You may have a contrary opinion. I have no problem about that. I am only expressing ideas on what has helped me to be successful.

Backlinks are the key to high search engine ranking. With good and relevant backlinks from other sites, a site cannot be profitable. Backlinks are part of off-page optmization strategies and in my opinion I believe that off-page is stronger than on-page optimization when talking about SEO.

However, in some cases, your site backlinks can work against you and cause your site to fall from the search engine ranking and in certain cases be deleted completely from search engine index. That means instead of those backlinks helping your site rank well, they would be doing the opposite. These are the ways that can happen:

1. Having too many backlinks from forums and blogs, etc. - If the majority of the backlinks are from forums and blogs, your site could be regarded as a spam site. In most cases, forums are the ways people use to get hundreds of multiple backlinks. Tools have even been developed that could speed up link from these sites.

2. Buying links from other sites - Buying links from other sites will harm your search engine ranking because such links are not placed in the proper places. Have you ever noticed that purchased links are only displayed on a certain page created specifically for that? A good link that counts is one that is within the content of the other site. That is how to identify a link that was not purchased

3. Getting too many no-follow backlinks - Have you been using all kinds of software to get backlinks to your site? Many of those links created by those tools are NoFollow backlinks and cannot help you in any way. However, to make your link building look natural, you can maintain some no-follow backlinks. If you must buy links from other sites, make sure you cover your footprints properly.

4. Too many links from sites with low pagerank - If the majority of your backlinks are from low pagerank sites, your backlinks would be of little help.

5. Excessive Link Exchange - If your backlinks only contain reciprocal links, the backlinks would be regarded as artificial. That means you are exchanging links with the sole purpose of boosting your link popularity.

6. Links not containing site keyword is anchor text - If your backlinks contain anchor text not related to your site, the backlink is of no use. If you are doing blog commeting, make sure you use your keyword as the anchor text.

7. Building thousands of links overnight - Building thousands of backlinks overnight make your site too look unnatural. This is a sign of a spam site. Such baklinks do not count in the search engines and your site can be de-indexed.

8. Using link farms - Search engines hate link farms because it is believed that such farms don't provide any benefit for internet users. If you don't know, link farms are a combination of sites that link each other with the main aim of increasing their link popularity. In most cases, sites are not related and they contain little or no content that could benefit internet users.

9. Link from duplicate content, p-orn, banned and illegal sites - Links from these sites make your site to be regarded as one of them and that you have no value to offer internet users.

10. Links from unrelated sites - If most of your backlinks are from sites not related to your website, those links will not help your ranking. Even if you are using tools to discover auto-approve sites, use keywords to filter the sites to those within your site niche.

[LiamP]

I'm not getting into any debates, but for any noobs out there - don't take this list as a consensus opinion but just as one persons opinion.
There are many SEO experts who will disagree with much of the list and say much of it (or all) is false.

[wordpresstrainingpackage]

Of course, people can say all of them are false. What I have written is not binding on anybody. They are based on my personal experience and that of other people who came to me for advice.

Originally Posted by LiamP

I'm not getting into any debates, but for any noobs out there - don't take this list as a consensus opinion but just as one persons opinion.
There are many SEO experts who will disagree with much of the list and say much of it (or all) is false.

[Samuel Hawthorne]

So what you're saying is that Google allows me to sabotage my competition by following your list?

Get serious ...

[wordpresstrainingpackage]

The conclusion is left for you to make. My list is not talking about competition or any form of sabotage. If you like, you can continue to do what you are doing.

Originally Posted by Samuel Hawthorne

So what you're saying is that Google allows me to sabotage my competition by following your list?

Get serious ...

[Alex Barboza]

This list makes no sense tome. Sorry.

[wordpresstrainingpackage]

Of course, it is not meant to make sense to you if you are of other opinion. Keep doing what you are doing.

Originally Posted by AlexBarboza

This list makes no sense tome. Sorry.

[deloriagod]

1. So if I comment on 3 massive blogs that have top commentator plugins and get 15,000 links from blogs and not a whole lot from other sources, I'm magically going to get penalized? Not true. I would be commenting on blogs like that for all of my competitors.

2. The site selling the links gets penalized, not you. All you did was buy a crappy link.

3. More and more sites are going to nofollow. There's no way anyone is getting penalized for having nofollow links.

4. Similar to my response to #1, if this was true I would be building PR n/a or 0 links for my competition instead of looking for better links for myself.

5. I don't have experience with reciprocal links, but I really doubt this.

6. That's just dumb, on 2 levels. First of all, your site is never ranked. Individual pages are. Second, using a different keyword as anchor text is a good idea. You'll rank for more keywords and you'll look less like a spammer.

7. When was the last time Google (or any SE) crawled every webpage on the internet in one night? Good luck getting thousands of links indexed in such a short amount of time that you actually upset a SE.

8. No comment, never even wanted to test link farms.

9. You don't know what duplicate content is or else you wouldn't have mentioned it as a possible backlink.

10. Relevancy is a bit of a debate. I have sites with links from irrelevant sites (relevant anchor text though) ranking just fine. The relevancy won't hurt you one bit.

[dadamson]

There is always a lot of debate on this subject but the fact is, offpage SEO can't hurt you too much.

I understand that blackhat onpage tactics like keyword stuffing can effect your rankings but most of the things mentioned on the OP will actually increase your rankings.

It is not advisable to go and get 1000's of low quality links because you will either be wasting your money or your time. Google will not count most of these links towards your ranking at all.

As discussed here, if creating loads of links to your site can hurt rankings, everyone would be doing this to their competition to get more visibility in the SERPs.

If Google really worked like this, the internet would be in chaos with spam.

[wordpresstrainingpackage]

When majority of the people are used to certain practices, it is difficult to change. Many times, we don't take time to examine our actions when things are not going the way they should. What I have posted here are facts and in the long run, they will help those who do what the search engines want. However, you may get a short term success if you use all other tactics to outsmart the search engines. But what is the essence of doing those things that would at the end destroy your labor of many weeks and months?

I will go through through the points and shed more light on them for better understand of those who are still tied to their ways of building links. For more information, you may refer to the Google webmasters guide here:

Link schemes - Webmaster Tools Help

1. Having too many backlinks from forums and blogs, etc. - Majority of backlinks from forums and blogs are not natural backlinks. Majority of the backlinks are created through automated means with special tools made for that purpose. Backlinks from normal websites are more natural because they are no widespread automated tools used for spamming. If you are getting 15,000 links from blogs, we both know that that cannot be created in a day through natural means. If your 15,000 links are really working for you, you should have made millions of dollars online by now.

You are the not only one using all forms of tactics to get 15,000 links from blogs. The search engines know this. There are thousands of internet marketers getting 15,000 links from blogs overnight. The search engines know that all these links were got through all forms of spamming. Therefore, more relevenace are placed on links from other type of sites that can hadly be achieved with any form of spamming.

2. Buying links from other sites - You have said it all. "The site selling the links gets penalized, not you. All you did was buy a crappy link." Now my question is, Did you expect the search engines to respect those links? Did you expect Google to give you Top 10 search ranking for buy links from a site that has just been penalized?

For more information, check here:

Paid links - Webmaster Tools Help

3. Getting too many no-follow backlinks

If you say more and more sites are going nofollow, that is not true. There are still thousands of dofollow blogs in many niches. The problem is that most people are used to using software to do things and we don't take time to manually check certain things to be assured that things are working correctly. Most tools only allow you to send comments to other blogs irrespective of whether the blog is dofollow or not. Those who are serious about dofollow blogs even create scripts that would first search for dofollow blogs and get their urls. The urls will then be loaded to other tool for commenting on those blogs.

4. Too many links from sites with low pagerank

If you took time to read what I said, you would notice that I did not say low pagerank sites should be ignored. To make it clear to you if you did not understand. The higher the pagerank of sites the better it is to help your site for SEO. A backlink from a site with higher pagerank works better than a backlink from a site with lower pagerank. If the majority of the backlinks are from low pagerank sites, it is not too good.

5. Excessive Link Exchange

If you don't have experience, that means you don't know about it. Then my question is, Why should you doubt what you don't know? It is after a person understands a concept that he or she would be able to believe in it or not.

Link exchange is the linking back to sites that link to you. That means if site A links to Site B, Site B is bound to link back to Site A.

For more information on why you should not depend too much on excessive link exchange, check here:

Link schemes - Webmaster Tools Help

Link exchanging means both sites are at par. This is not a natural linking. A backlink has more weight if there is only a link to your site without you linking back to the other site.

6. Links not containing site keyword is anchor text

Notwithstanding your crude language, I will still explain what I meant here.

Backlinks should contain anchor a site keyword as anchor text. A site keyword is anot a single keyword for the entire site pages. Site has a main keyword representing the niche and other keywords of relevant pages relating to the main keyword. For instance, if your site is in the weight loss niche, your anchor text for proper backlinking could be weight loss, weight loss for women, belly fat loss, child obesity, etc. These are keywords to be used as anchor texts if you want your backlinks to really count well for you.

7. Building thousands of links overnight

Google can crawl every web page of your site overnight if the Google bots believed the pages were created by humans. For instance, if your site contains 5 pages today, you should not expect the Google bots to crawl and index all pages if your page count has jumped to 600 pages. Search engines bots know spam blogs and blogs which are not spam. In the case of backlinks, the bots do not need to crawl your site to discover the backlinks. The bots go out to crawl other sites with which you have built backlinks. If the links are dofollow, the bots then recognize that your site own the backlinks. This is the way bots read backlinks.

8. Using link farms

No comment if you agreed on the impact of link farms on your site ranking.

9. Link from duplicate content, p-orn, banned and illegal sites

Backlink from a site with duplicate content is of no value to you. A site full of duplicate content is not given priority placement in the search ranking. The site cannot have a high ranking because it contains the same content on original sites. If you want to create value for internet users and make money online create sites with unique content and build backlinks from sites with unique content.

10. Links from unrelated sites

Relevancy is not of a debate. We all know that a site teaching how to play gold is in the same niche as a site selling gold equipment. A backlink froma general sports equipment site is also related. Compare the backlink of the golf site from a site selling computers. Some things are common sense and don't need any debate.

Originally Posted by deloriagod

1. So if I comment on 3 massive blogs that have top commentator plugins and get 15,000 links from blogs and not a whole lot from other sources, I'm magically going to get penalized? Not true. I would be commenting on blogs like that for all of my competitors.

2. The site selling the links gets penalized, not you. All you did was buy a crappy link.

3. More and more sites are going to nofollow. There's no way anyone is getting penalized for having nofollow links.

4. Similar to my response to #1, if this was true I would be building PR n/a or 0 links for my competition instead of looking for better links for myself.

5. I don't have experience with reciprocal links, but I really doubt this.

6. That's just dumb, on 2 levels. First of all, your site is never ranked. Individual pages are. Second, using a different keyword as anchor text is a good idea. You'll rank for more keywords and you'll look less like a spammer.

7. When was the last time Google (or any SE) crawled every webpage on the internet in one night? Good luck getting thousands of links indexed in such a short amount of time that you actually upset a SE.

8. No comment, never even wanted to test link farms.

9. You don't know what duplicate content is or else you wouldn't have mentioned it as a possible backlink.

10. Relevancy is a bit of a debate. I have sites with links from irrelevant sites (relevant anchor text though) ranking just fine. The relevancy won't hurt you one bit.

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by LiamP

I'm not getting into any debates, but for any noobs out there - don't take this list as a consensus opinion but just as one persons opinion.
There are many SEO experts who will disagree with much of the list and say much of it (or all) is false.

Yea, I would say that about 2% of the OP's post makes sense

Tom

[wordpresstrainingpackage]

Of course, it can be used to hurt the competition. That is the problem. And Google does not want to know that it is a sabotage from the competition. For example, if you are just clicking the Adsense ads of your competitor's website for some consecutive days, did you think Google would not ban the adsense account? Google does not care to know that it was a click fraud carried out by a competitor.

The same applies to backlinks. As it can be used to boost your search engine ranking, it can also be used as a destroyer. This is what many people don't know. Backlining (off-page optimization) is more powerful than on-page optimization. Backlinking can be used to damage search engine ranking of your competitors.

Originally Posted by dadamson

There is always a lot of debate on this subject but the fact is, offpage SEO can't hurt you too much.

I understand that BlueFart onpage tactics like keyword stuffing can effect your rankings but most of the things mentioned on the OP will actually increase your rankings.

It is not advisable to go and get 1000's of low quality links because you will either be wasting your money or your time. Google will not count most of these links towards your ranking at all.

As discussed here, if creating loads of links to your site can hurt rankings, everyone would be doing this to their competition to get more visibility in the SERPs.

If Google really worked like this, the internet would be in chaos with spam.

[wordpresstrainingpackage]

Of course, it can be used to hurt the competition. That is the problem. And Google does not want to know that it is a sabotage from the competition. For example, if you are just clicking the Adsense ads of your competitor's website for some consecutive days, did you think Google would not ban the adsense account? Google does not care to know that it was a click fraud carried out by a competitor.

The same applies to backlinks. As it can be used to boost your search engine ranking, it can also be used as a destroyer. This is what many people don't know. Backlining (off-page optimization) is more powerful than on-page optimization. Backlinking can be used to damage search engine ranking of your competitors.

Originally Posted by Samuel Hawthorne

So what you're saying is that Google allows me to sabotage my competition by following your list?

Get serious ...

[wordpresstrainingpackage]

Of course, what I have said is my opinion. I dont expect it to make sense to you if you are of a contrary opinion. This is for those who want to see things differently from the way majority of the people have been carried along

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Yea, I would say that about 2% of the OP's post makes sense

Tom

[wordpresstrainingpackage]

I am not expecting SEO experts to agree with what I have said here. I have said what I believe. It is left for anyone to believe or not.

Originally Posted by LiamP

I'm not getting into any debates, but for any noobs out there - don't take this list as a consensus opinion but just as one persons opinion.
There are many SEO experts who will disagree with much of the list and say much of it (or all) is false.

[paulgl]

Crazy man, crazy.

I guess you don't tell anyone to publish an ezine article....
Duplicate content thing, ya know

I sell a ton of links and people love it! I love it!

I could go on, but man, Tom Goodwin is being polite about 2%.
More like 0.00001%.

Unrelated links???????? Man is that rich! Everyone PLEASE DELETE YOUR SIG!!!
Including OP! Don't damage your site! We'd hate to have the WF take you down.

I rarely comment on sig links, but the OP has an autoblog creator link?

In fact, here is a quote from one of the pages:

Complete with 100% Full Automation

- Autopost for Amazon

- Autopost from Yahoo Answers

- Keyword-targeted video posting are automatically inserted

- Austopost from RSS

- News Contents - Latest news contents based on your chosen keywords are added to your blog daily

- Austopost from Flickr

- Autopost from Article Directories - Articles are randomly retrieved from multiple article sites

I rest my case.

Paul

[jesus72knight]

This issue will never be resolve as we are not the people behind Big G. There are off-page SEO tactics that may work for me and may not work for you. We all do SEO jabs on varying niches and rate of keyword difficulties. So, let us keep our ways of doing SEO to ourselves.

[Tom Goodwin]

OK....lets have some fun...

Originally Posted by wordpresstrainingpackage

1. Having too many backlinks from forums and blogs, etc. - If the majority of the backlinks are from forums and blogs, your site could be regarded as a spam site. In most cases, forums are the ways people use to get hundreds of multiple backlinks. Tools have even been developed that could speed up link from these sites.

Originally Posted by wordpresstrainingpackage

1. Having too many backlinks from forums and blogs, etc. - Majority of backlinks from forums and blogs are not natural backlinks. Majority of the backlinks are created through automated means with special tools made for that purpose. Backlinks from normal websites are more natural because they are no widespread automated tools used for spamming. If you are getting 15,000 links from blogs, we both know that that cannot be created in a day through natural means. If your 15,000 links are really working for you, you should have made millions of dollars online by now.

You are the not only one using all forms of tactics to get 15,000 links from blogs. The search engines know this. There are thousands of internet marketers getting 15,000 links from blogs overnight. The search engines know that all these links were got through all forms of spamming. Therefore, more relevenace are placed on links from other type of sites that can hadly be achieved with any form of spamming.

First, you must understand something. There is no doubt that Google's web spam team puts out various articles and posts about how they want webmasters to behave. They are the masters of manipulation. That being said, just because something is stated on one of Google’s various manipulation, er web, sites, does not make it a fact.

Let’s say Google really loves the color red. They decide to organize a marathon, where the participants get to choose what color their bib is. But, let’s say if you where a blue bib, that will help you run the race 2 seconds faster, no matter whether you are a fast or slow runner. What would Google do? They would issue a public statement that if you blue bibs don’t help, and that you should wear a red bib. What is the result? Lots of people will wear red bibs, even if they would run faster with the blue bib.

You need to escape out of what Google says and test out things and see what is true in reality.

In any event, Matt Cutts has stated that you competitors’ couldn’t harm you by things like link building to your site. So, at the very worst, the links would just be de-valued. But, I can tell you first hand that even super spammy links can help a lot.

Originally Posted by wordpresstrainingpackage

2. Buying links from other sites - Buying links from other sites will harm your search engine ranking because such links are not placed in the proper places. Have you ever noticed that purchased links are only displayed on a certain page created specifically for that? A good link that counts is one that is within the content of the other site. That is how to identify a link that was not purchased

Originally Posted by wordpresstrainingpackage

2. Buying links from other sites - You have said it all. "The site selling the links gets penalized, not you. All you did was buy a crappy link." Now my question is, Did you expect the search engines to respect those links? Did you expect Google to give you Top 10 search ranking for buy links from a site that has just been penalized?

For more information, check here:

Paid links - Webmaster Tools Help [/QUOTE]

Linking to what Google says on the matter does not prove your point I’m afraid as I already noted above. Also, there is a difference between penalty and de-valuation of a link.



Also, you don’t seem to know that much about link buying. You have some pre-conceived notion of what a paid link must look like, when in fact they can look like anything. Second, while the seller can certainly get penalized, if you could get penalized for the buying, I could simply send paid links to my comeptitors’ sites and I would be #1 by default. I’ve got lots of sites I’ll happily take paid links from. I’ll PM them to you to send links to if you want.

Originally Posted by wordpresstrainingpackage

3. Getting too many no-follow backlinks - Have you been using all kinds of software to get backlinks to your site? Many of those links created by those tools are NoFollow backlinks and cannot help you in any way. However, to make your link building look natural, you can maintain some no-follow backlinks. If you must buy links from other sites, make sure you cover your footprints properly.

Originally Posted by wordpresstrainingpackage

If you say more and more sites are going nofollow, that is not true. There are still thousands of dofollow blogs in many niches. The problem is that most people are used to using software to do things and we don't take time to manually check certain things to be assured that things are working correctly. Most tools only allow you to send comments to other blogs irrespective of whether the blog is dofollow or not. Those who are serious about dofollow blogs even create scripts that would first search for dofollow blogs and get their urls. The urls will then be loaded to other tool for commenting on those blogs.

You state “If you say more and more sites are going nofollow, that is not true.” Then you say “There are still thousands of dofollow blogs in many niches.” Unfortunately, you first statement (your conclusion) does not follow from your second sentence. There is no doubt thousands of dofollow blogs, but that doesn’t mean that overall a higher percentage of sites can be turning no-follow. I’m not saying I agree with that, but your conclusion does not follow at all.

Originally Posted by wordpresstrainingpackage

4. Too many links from sites with low pagerank - If the majority of your backlinks are from low pagerank sites, your backlinks would be of little help.

You seem to be very big on the whole “natural” look of backlinks and backlink building. With that position, one would think you would realize that a “natural” backlink portfolio would have a huge percentage of links from pages with low pagerank as the vast majority of sites on the web have low pagerank.

All of your other points reflect a basic misunderstanding that “natural” looking links or linkbuilding is actually rewarded by Google, when it is not. As for the irrelevant links not helping, as someone who sells links on hundreds of “irrelevant” sites, I can assure you that they do in fact help a lot

Again, linking to Google might help you sleep at night, but it doesn’t demonstrate anything with respect to how Google’s algo actually works.

Tom

[pethanks]

This is a great information. I've never heard this before. Thank you for sharing.

[deloriagod]

Originally Posted by wordpresstrainingpackage

When majority of the people are used to certain practices, it is difficult to change. Many times, we don't take time to examine our actions when things are not going the way they should. What I have posted here are facts and in the long run, they will help those who do what the search engines want. However, you may get a short term success if you use all other tactics to outsmart the search engines. But what is the essence of doing those things that would at the end destroy your labor of many weeks and months?

I will go through through the points and shed more light on them for better understand of those who are still tied to their ways of building links. For more information, you may refer to the Google webmasters guide here:

Link schemes - Webmaster Tools Help

1. Having too many backlinks from forums and blogs, etc. - Majority of backlinks from forums and blogs are not natural backlinks. Majority of the backlinks are created through automated means with special tools made for that purpose. Backlinks from normal websites are more natural because they are no widespread automated tools used for spamming. If you are getting 15,000 links from blogs, we both know that that cannot be created in a day through natural means. If your 15,000 links are really working for you, you should have made millions of dollars online by now.

You are the not only one using all forms of tactics to get 15,000 links from blogs. The search engines know this. There are thousands of internet marketers getting 15,000 links from blogs overnight. The search engines know that all these links were got through all forms of spamming. Therefore, more relevenace are placed on links from other type of sites that can hadly be achieved with any form of spamming.

2. Buying links from other sites - You have said it all. "The site selling the links gets penalized, not you. All you did was buy a crappy link." Now my question is, Did you expect the search engines to respect those links? Did you expect Google to give you Top 10 search ranking for buy links from a site that has just been penalized?

For more information, check here:

Paid links - Webmaster Tools Help

3. Getting too many no-follow backlinks

If you say more and more sites are going nofollow, that is not true. There are still thousands of dofollow blogs in many niches. The problem is that most people are used to using software to do things and we don't take time to manually check certain things to be assured that things are working correctly. Most tools only allow you to send comments to other blogs irrespective of whether the blog is dofollow or not. Those who are serious about dofollow blogs even create scripts that would first search for dofollow blogs and get their urls. The urls will then be loaded to other tool for commenting on those blogs.

4. Too many links from sites with low pagerank

If you took time to read what I said, you would notice that I did not say low pagerank sites should be ignored. To make it clear to you if you did not understand. The higher the pagerank of sites the better it is to help your site for SEO. A backlink from a site with higher pagerank works better than a backlink from a site with lower pagerank. If the majority of the backlinks are from low pagerank sites, it is not too good.

5. Excessive Link Exchange

If you don't have experience, that means you don't know about it. Then my question is, Why should you doubt what you don't know? It is after a person understands a concept that he or she would be able to believe in it or not.

Link exchange is the linking back to sites that link to you. That means if site A links to Site B, Site B is bound to link back to Site A.

For more information on why you should not depend too much on excessive link exchange, check here:

Link schemes - Webmaster Tools Help

Link exchanging means both sites are at par. This is not a natural linking. A backlink has more weight if there is only a link to your site without you linking back to the other site.

6. Links not containing site keyword is anchor text

Notwithstanding your crude language, I will still explain what I meant here.

Backlinks should contain anchor a site keyword as anchor text. A site keyword is anot a single keyword for the entire site pages. Site has a main keyword representing the niche and other keywords of relevant pages relating to the main keyword. For instance, if your site is in the weight loss niche, your anchor text for proper backlinking could be weight loss, weight loss for women, belly fat loss, child obesity, etc. These are keywords to be used as anchor texts if you want your backlinks to really count well for you.

7. Building thousands of links overnight

Google can crawl every web page of your site overnight if the Google bots believed the pages were created by humans. For instance, if your site contains 5 pages today, you should not expect the Google bots to crawl and index all pages if your page count has jumped to 600 pages. Search engines bots know spam blogs and blogs which are not spam. In the case of backlinks, the bots do not need to crawl your site to discover the backlinks. The bots go out to crawl other sites with which you have built backlinks. If the links are dofollow, the bots then recognize that your site own the backlinks. This is the way bots read backlinks.

8. Using link farms

No comment if you agreed on the impact of link farms on your site ranking.

9. Link from duplicate content, p-orn, banned and illegal sites

Backlink from a site with duplicate content is of no value to you. A site full of duplicate content is not given priority placement in the search ranking. The site cannot have a high ranking because it contains the same content on original sites. If you want to create value for internet users and make money online create sites with unique content and build backlinks from sites with unique content.

10. Links from unrelated sites

Relevancy is not of a debate. We all know that a site teaching how to play gold is in the same niche as a site selling gold equipment. A backlink froma general sports equipment site is also related. Compare the backlink of the golf site from a site selling computers. Some things are common sense and don't need any debate.

While I can sit here and point out things that don't make any sense and areas that are just plain wrong, we would both just argue our points until one of us gets tired of typing the same thing over and over again. What I see is that you're making off-page SEO harder than it has to be.

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by wordpresstrainingpackage

I have said what I believe. It is left for anyone to believe or not.

YouTube - Charms Love Charms Money Charm Magic...

Try the protection and money charms, hang them on your monitor while uploading your site and doing link building. It really works if you believe!

[socialbookmark]

I don't agree with #10 (Links from unrelated sites). Having links from unrelated websites can't hurt our ranking. Maybe it doesn't help our websites to rank higher in search engines, but it can't hurt too if these backlinks made in quality websites. Its better to have backlinks from relevant websites and in this case our ranking in search engines will be improved but there are many of websites which have most of their backlinks from unrelated pages but they are still rank high in search engines.

[Norma Rickman]

Wow. I see so many untruths and misconceptions about link building in the OP that I don't even know where to start.

For one thing, if you know what you are doing, you don't post thousands of links to your money sites. That's just plain stupidity. That's what parasites are for.

And your statements about duplicate content and links from unrelated sites leave me puzzled. Syndicated content and duplicate content are far different things. Duplicate content is the same content post on the same site, not content that say you have published on a blog then submitted to an article directory.

And as far as links from unrelated sites? Let's think about this one: I have a link to one of my sites that is in an education niche from Problogger.com . That's a PR 5 site. So that's worth less link juice than a link from a site that is a PR N/A in my own niche?

Please.

[GeorgettaSterling]

I find it bizarre that some of the folks posting on this thread start by saying that Google's SEO proclamations are lies and propaganda (they are), and then QUOTE one piece of that propaganda (the old "your competitors can't hurt you/links can't hurt you" chestnut) to support their own arguments.

So, is the stuff that Google says all bunk UNLESS it makes you feel better?

I think that the OP got off the tracks on some of his/her points - for example, the vast majority of backlinks on the net are technically from "unrelated" sites - I talk about my camping trip on my knitting blog and link to a great compass I found - that has nothing to do with the "theme" of my blog.

However, I submit that in some cases backlinks could potentially harm SERPS. My proof is that there are people who will wreck a competitor's SERPS for you for a fee. At least two that I know of accept payment via escrow, with the money released only when the job is successful. These folks use various offpage tactics (since they generally cannot access the target website). What that says to me is that while Google CLAIMS that a competitor cannot hurt you, or that backlinks cannot hurt you, the massive negative Xrumer campaign or similar has been effective in hurting other sites. Not Amazon or Wikipedia, but vulnerable Mom & Pop sites.

That's as far as I will go on this. Carry on...

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by GeorgettaSterling

I find it bizarre that some of the folks posting on this thread start by saying that Google's SEO proclamations are lies and propaganda (they are), and then QUOTE one piece of that propaganda (the old "your competitors can't hurt you/links can't hurt you" chestnut) to support their own arguments.

So, is the stuff that Google says all bunk UNLESS it makes you feel better?
.

No, it's actually just about applying common sense. Something that i'm afraid is lacking around seo forums often.

I've got tons of sites that will happily take any spammy links, any comment spam, any profile links, any link farm links, any paid links, any Britney Spears porn links, or whatever you can throw at them.

[Billy Rey]

op is brilliant. He caused this much reaction for a topic that appears a gazillion times daily.

That's a marketer!

[Roger Rowe]

Originally Posted by Billy Rey

op is brilliant. He caused this much reaction for a topic that appears a gazillion times daily.

That's a marketer!

LOL

I agree!

But his content is:

[HugoLand]

Tom said: (Google): "They are the masters of manipulation"

Yes, yes, yes.

Google is the worse "black hat" SEO.

[juggernautbitch]

I've seen some rubbish posted in my time, but this OP takes the biscuit.

[piratejoe84]

Hmmmm, I guess that since I am doing most of the 10 things the OP is saying not to, my higher rankings must be an illusion. Must be the lucky charms on my monitor. 8)

[4morereferrals]

OP - Attention Whore Much?

[4morereferrals]

Absolute EPIC!!!

Originally Posted by Roger Rowe

LOL

I agree!

But his content is:

[Mike Anthony]

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

Yea, I would say that about 2% of the OP's post makes sense

Tom

Even I would max that out at barely 5%. Thats a pretty bad and misleading list.

[enursa]

It's really help me... thanks for your info.

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by 4morereferrals

OP - Attention Whore Much?

There seems to be an inverse correlation between people starting "Tips" threads and their actual knowledge of the subject matter.

I might have to "borrow" that bovine excrement image from time to time.

[jazbo]

Wow, it appears all the usual suspects (including me) agree for once - the OP is spouting mostly utter rubbish.

Move along, nothing to see here.

[miklanderson2]

Hmmm...In regards to number 6. A lot of the high-PR blogs I post comments on don't allow anchor text in the links. You have to use your name or the comment won't be accepted.

I understand that it's BETTER to have anchor text as your link but I'll take a high-PR blog comment anchored by my name over a low-PR blog comment anchored by my keywords any day of the week.

[plasaberita]

actually i agree with the most of your opinion..But i'm not sure backlink from forum will against ourself...

[lenthenmartin]

You can also use techniques to get backlinks linkbaiting. Linkbait indicates the process of putting a blog on the website is designed to acquire links from various sources.

[adelainewatson]

Thanks for sharing, your an SEO expert.. Your advice are the exact technique to increase backlinks of a certain website.

[antonisid]

How many links from forums , blogs etc. are too much to be regarded as a spam site? Read my thread , i haven't more than 10 backlinks and i think that Google banned me.

Is My Website Banned from Google?

[samual james]

will you please tell me i am regular poster on forums and in 10 forums i have more than 3000+ posts and i am getting link juice from those sites so will my site considered as a spam or its called genuine links. According to me if you getting links from no follow and do follow sites then google will never consider you as a spammer because you are getting links in natural way (Too many links harm your site badly)

[jessyjose123]

Thanks for sharing your knowledge..Keep posting useful information like this!

[alchemyquiz]

I have also found an interesting site about Backlink management . You can visit it if you're Interested.Which give some grest tips.

[ThisIsMyHealth]

@ OP - I'm quite sure you only meant to help with your list, but when it comes to backlinking, theory alone is not enough; you need proof.

That's why when someone like Tom says BS, I perk up. Why? Because Tom literally spends his days trying all the things you said NOT to do, just to see if they ACTUALLY hurt a site's rankings.

So when Tom says BS, it's because he's tried to crash his site with some of those taboo backlinking strategies and has had no luck. It's important to remember that just because you've gone down one road and seen success doesn't mean that all other roads are wrong.

Good try, but next time make sure you have proof. This forum is not kind to people who guess lol...

[joetheseo]

Originally Posted by Tom Goodwin

No, it's actually just about applying common sense. Something that i'm afraid is lacking around seo forums often.

I've got tons of sites that will happily take any spammy links, any comment spam, any profile links, any link farm links, any paid links, any Britney Spears porn links, or whatever you can throw at them.

+1 Well said