SEO (Backlinks) - What Not to Do
- ARTICLES |
As a general component of Internet marketing and SEO, backlinking has been around for a long time. There are a ton of tutorials, strategies and backlinking practices out there that have all been in use for some time, with varying degrees of effectiveness.
The problem is that as times change, technology grows, moods change and new search algorithms come into use, some strategies for disseminating and collecting backlinks no longer work as well. What’s worse is that some of these strategies can be so disdainful in the eyes of search engines that they can actually be harmful to your site.
Those are precisely the types of practices we are going to talk about in this first section– the backlinking methods you should avoid or cease, because they will wind up stinging you. There is a lot of advice on backlinking out there on the Internet, but not all of it is good.
So we start but separating the bad from the good.
Sources That Get Penalized by Panda & Penguin
I suppose I could have called this bit “Sources That Get Pandalized & Penguilized,” but then I might be the only one who knew what I was talking about!
Over the past year and a half or so, starting in January 2011, Google has released and updated two new search algorithms designed to clean up search results and generally foster an easier an more enjoyable use experience on the web. The focus is on making it easier for users to find high quality content from their search queries, without having to wade through spam and keyword-stuffed nonsense.
Why this is important in backlinking is that we need to know which sites and what kinds of sites are likely to be penalized by Panda and Penguin, so we know to avoid them. Because, if your site is linked on one of these penalized sites, your traffic is adversely affected in two ways:
Your link is seen by fewer people because the source page has lower page rank (PR) than it used to.
Your site’s PR is affected as well, because it is linked from a “low quality” or “spammy” source.
Obviously, these are problems you want to avoid with your site, so that’s exactly what we’re going to get into first – a very specific discussion of what not to do, starting with the types of sources that are known to get penalized by Panda & Penguin.
1. Automated Blogs (“Auto” Blogs)
Once a hot trend in SEO, automated blogs have fallen out of favor, mostly because they have been dinged so hard by Google. These sites scrape blogs and other sites around the Internet for content, then either spin it for posting or repost it directly in order to generate massive volumes of content. The idea is that more content means more keywords indexed, which yields more traffice. You have undoubtedly come across automated blogs before and seen sales pitches for software to automate your blog, making promises like these:
While most of these claims may be technically true, these days automated blogging doesn’t help increase traffic at all. In fact, Panda drops auto blogs in SERPs, and sites that are linked on auto blogs fall down the rankings as well. Auto blogs carry some of the key characteristics that Panda is on the look out for when it seeks to improve user experience:
Auto blogs are not the kind of source you want for your backlinks. Avoid them at all costs.
2. Micro Sites
A second kind of site that Panda does not take kindly to is the so-called “sniper site” – a site that targets one specific keyword and tailors all of its content to hit that one keyword over and over again. The term “sniper” comes from the term for a sharpshooter who identifies and takes out just one target at a time, just like this single keyword approach.
In contrast, you can think of auto blogs as being like a bomb that targets everything it can possibly get a hold of.
While sniper strategies still can work in the age of Panda, the problem is that they have to constantly be transformed and evolved to stay one step ahead of the algorithm. It becomes an SEO arms race, and when your opponent has the resources of Google, that is a race you don’t stand much chance of winning – and neither do the owners of sniper sites where your backlinks would reside. Targeting one keyword results in lots of duplicate content, title tags and meta tags, which Panda will punish.
Panda is not the only animal-themed algorithm to be aware of these days, either. Penguin, a newer, additional piece of technology from Google, targets black hat SEO tactics in order to reduce web spam. There is plenty of overlap between what Panda and Penguin frown upon – such as auto blogs and sniper sites, to name two – but Penguin is designed with a more specific target in mind.
The two work in tandem when it comes to search rankings, so you must be aware of the link sources that Penguin will ding, also. Keep in mind that leveraged launch sites are NOT sniper sites. These sites are designed to capture active, buying-lead traffic for a number of long tails by providing a useful information source for those buyers. We just happen to be looking for long tails that are not competitive and therefore can rank (at least in the short term) with less work.
3. Sites With Many Non-Niche Links
With an emphasis on quality content comes an emphasis on authority, which means that links between sites are worth more if they are in the same niche. This is has to do with the way Google views and perceives normal linking practices.
To illustrate, consider an example. Let’s say you have a site that promotes any given product – like avocados. Maybe you are responsible for marketing for a conglomerate of avocado farmers. You want to establish links to other similarly oriented sites, so you would naturally link to guacamole recipes, articles about uses for avocados, information about organic farming techniques, maybe reviews of some popular restaurant foods that use avocados, and so on. You aren’t logically going to make a point of linking to sites about junk yards, human cloning or celebrity gossip.
So, when a site has links that are in topics that range all over the place with no real rhyme or reason, Google views that as an “unnatural” linking practice, used in an attempt to spam the search engine. This has been a fairly common practice on the web for years, but Penguin doesn’t like it and punishes sites that have many non-niche links.
Again, these are the kind of sites where you do not want your backlinks to appear. If you see a trackback for your site, and follow it to a site that has a tag cloud that looks like the one below, don’t approve it.
Not only is that site going to be punished in SERPs by Penguin, the sites it links to will be hampered as well.
This does not necessarily mean that any site covering a wide range of topics is a poor link source, per se. What it does mean is that when a niche site has many links that do not pertain to its niche, Penguin perceives that as unnatural and spammy. You can use non-niche sites as a link source effectively, and in fact we will get into some ways to do that later on.
4. Lack of Anchor Text Diversity
We talked about how anchor text can affect appearance in search results. Sites where 65-70+% of links are anchored by keyword text tend to be penalized by Penguin. Ideally, a site should have a keyword density of about 50-60% in its anchor text, with the rest of the links being anchored by text that contains calls to action, like “For more details, click here!”
5. Keyword Stuffing
Any site with an extremely high keyword density is viewed by Penguin as web spam, in the same way as the sniper sites we talked about above. While we don’t know for sure how high a keyword density is too high, a general recommendation is to keep it below 4.5% per page. That is the guideline that is used by the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast, which is discussed in further detail in High Traffic Academy.
A backlink on a site that is stuffed with keywords will not be worth much post-Penguin.
6. High Ratio of Affiliate Links to Content
Penguin and Panda are both desgined to increase the overall quality of content that the user sees. Since users don’t really enjoy have a ton of affiliate ads shoved in their faces with no real content to help them with their search, sites that have too many affiliate links and too little content are not looked upon favorably.
Trying to establish backlinks on any of these six types of sites is a bad idea. Not only are they poor link sources to draw in an audience, your site will wind up suffering in page ranks. Efforts to backlink on auto blogs, sniper sites, or sites with any of the above characteristics will do more harm than good, and you should make a concerted effort to avoid them.
Aside from these harmful link sources, there are some other sources that have been traditionally used for backlinks that are not necessarily penalized by these algorithms – although they can be – but are generally just not very good or efficient. Having backlinks on these types of sites won’t necessarily hurt you in the same way that the above ones will, but they are not very effective and aren’t worth the time and effort to try to establish links.
We will call these “poor link sources” and discuss them next.
Poor Link Sources
Whether they are poorly received by search engines, inefficient or just ineffective, some backlink sources are just plain bad and not worth your time as part of a backlinking strategy. Some of them seem obvious based on everything you have read in this program so far, so we won’t go over every kind of poor link source in depth. Plus, you will have the opportunity to see strong link sources inside High Traffic Academy, so if you just stick to those, your site will be golden.
Still, it pays to know about what things you should avoid, so here are four examples of poor link sources and why you should stay away from them.
Link Pyramids
A link pyramid is a system of backlinks, arranged in tiers by the general “quality” of the site and the volume of backlinks you put on it. A general link pyramid structure goes like this
The bottom of the pyramid is made up of hundreds of links on “low quality” sites that you create, such as blogs on free hosts and Squiddo lenses. These sites consist almost entirely of outbound links, most of which are random and spammy, and some of which point to your other sites.
On the second level of the pyramid are TLD sites on cheap hosting platforms. These sites contain spun, keyword-stuffed content that is generally low quality. Links come into this site from the 1st level, but don’t get back the other way. The links in this site contain anchor text and direct users to the top level of your pyramid.
Here you have your best site(s), on TLDs with professional design. These are the niche authority sites that you want people to visit to begin with.
This is a standard, generic link pyramid. This is a black hat SEO strategy that people have been using effectively for quite some time to drive traffic to their product.
The problem with link pyramids, though, is that they take a ton of work to build – just look at all the sites you have to create! – just to get started. For the amount of traffic you will actually generate with a link pyramid, versus what you could generate with the strategies I will tell you about later, you are getting very little bang for your buck from the pyramid.
Plus, Penguin and Panda are increasingly cracking down on the type of sites that would be in the first two levels of your pyramid anyway, so the strategy can even be counterproductive.
Forum Profile Links
One of main ways people have been trying to get their backlinks “out there” for a long time has been to use forums as a platform, including putting links in forum profiles. That way, every time you post in a forum, your link shows up alongside the post in your mini profile. Or, when people view your profile as someone who posts frequently, they click through to your site.
That’s the thinking, anyway. In reality, forum profile links just aren’t very efficient or effective to be relied on as part of a backlinking strategy. There are other ways to use forums to build backlinks, and we will discuss that later on, but using profile links is not one of them.
Low Page Rank Links
Sites with a low page rank are understandably not a very productive place for your links to be. These sites are not found readily by users because of their low rankings, so as a result you don’t get many impressions from your backlinks. You have better places to spend your backlinking time than dealing with low PR sites.
Follow/No Follow Diversity
In HTML code, a link can be assigned the attribute nofollow, which indicates to search engines that it should not be indexed and therefore it doesn’t get factored into the site’s page rank or spam profile. In code, a link that is designated nofollow.
By default, a link is a “do follow” – meaning search engines will index it – unless it contains the nofollow attribute.
Tired of building backlinks? Looking for other ways to get targeted traffic? How about getting 100,000 targeted visitors to your website today? Impossible? Let me show you how I made $48,333 in a single week - click HERE.
The problem is that as times change, technology grows, moods change and new search algorithms come into use, some strategies for disseminating and collecting backlinks no longer work as well. What’s worse is that some of these strategies can be so disdainful in the eyes of search engines that they can actually be harmful to your site.
Those are precisely the types of practices we are going to talk about in this first section– the backlinking methods you should avoid or cease, because they will wind up stinging you. There is a lot of advice on backlinking out there on the Internet, but not all of it is good.
So we start but separating the bad from the good.
Sources That Get Penalized by Panda & Penguin
I suppose I could have called this bit “Sources That Get Pandalized & Penguilized,” but then I might be the only one who knew what I was talking about!
Over the past year and a half or so, starting in January 2011, Google has released and updated two new search algorithms designed to clean up search results and generally foster an easier an more enjoyable use experience on the web. The focus is on making it easier for users to find high quality content from their search queries, without having to wade through spam and keyword-stuffed nonsense.
Why this is important in backlinking is that we need to know which sites and what kinds of sites are likely to be penalized by Panda and Penguin, so we know to avoid them. Because, if your site is linked on one of these penalized sites, your traffic is adversely affected in two ways:
Your link is seen by fewer people because the source page has lower page rank (PR) than it used to.
Your site’s PR is affected as well, because it is linked from a “low quality” or “spammy” source.
Obviously, these are problems you want to avoid with your site, so that’s exactly what we’re going to get into first – a very specific discussion of what not to do, starting with the types of sources that are known to get penalized by Panda & Penguin.
1. Automated Blogs (“Auto” Blogs)
Once a hot trend in SEO, automated blogs have fallen out of favor, mostly because they have been dinged so hard by Google. These sites scrape blogs and other sites around the Internet for content, then either spin it for posting or repost it directly in order to generate massive volumes of content. The idea is that more content means more keywords indexed, which yields more traffice. You have undoubtedly come across automated blogs before and seen sales pitches for software to automate your blog, making promises like these:
While most of these claims may be technically true, these days automated blogging doesn’t help increase traffic at all. In fact, Panda drops auto blogs in SERPs, and sites that are linked on auto blogs fall down the rankings as well. Auto blogs carry some of the key characteristics that Panda is on the look out for when it seeks to improve user experience:
- Duplicate content
- Poor quality content (especially when it has been spun automatically)
- Excessively high volume of content
- Spammy backlinks
- Lots of ads
Auto blogs are not the kind of source you want for your backlinks. Avoid them at all costs.
2. Micro Sites
A second kind of site that Panda does not take kindly to is the so-called “sniper site” – a site that targets one specific keyword and tailors all of its content to hit that one keyword over and over again. The term “sniper” comes from the term for a sharpshooter who identifies and takes out just one target at a time, just like this single keyword approach.
In contrast, you can think of auto blogs as being like a bomb that targets everything it can possibly get a hold of.
While sniper strategies still can work in the age of Panda, the problem is that they have to constantly be transformed and evolved to stay one step ahead of the algorithm. It becomes an SEO arms race, and when your opponent has the resources of Google, that is a race you don’t stand much chance of winning – and neither do the owners of sniper sites where your backlinks would reside. Targeting one keyword results in lots of duplicate content, title tags and meta tags, which Panda will punish.
Panda is not the only animal-themed algorithm to be aware of these days, either. Penguin, a newer, additional piece of technology from Google, targets black hat SEO tactics in order to reduce web spam. There is plenty of overlap between what Panda and Penguin frown upon – such as auto blogs and sniper sites, to name two – but Penguin is designed with a more specific target in mind.
The two work in tandem when it comes to search rankings, so you must be aware of the link sources that Penguin will ding, also. Keep in mind that leveraged launch sites are NOT sniper sites. These sites are designed to capture active, buying-lead traffic for a number of long tails by providing a useful information source for those buyers. We just happen to be looking for long tails that are not competitive and therefore can rank (at least in the short term) with less work.
3. Sites With Many Non-Niche Links
With an emphasis on quality content comes an emphasis on authority, which means that links between sites are worth more if they are in the same niche. This is has to do with the way Google views and perceives normal linking practices.
To illustrate, consider an example. Let’s say you have a site that promotes any given product – like avocados. Maybe you are responsible for marketing for a conglomerate of avocado farmers. You want to establish links to other similarly oriented sites, so you would naturally link to guacamole recipes, articles about uses for avocados, information about organic farming techniques, maybe reviews of some popular restaurant foods that use avocados, and so on. You aren’t logically going to make a point of linking to sites about junk yards, human cloning or celebrity gossip.
So, when a site has links that are in topics that range all over the place with no real rhyme or reason, Google views that as an “unnatural” linking practice, used in an attempt to spam the search engine. This has been a fairly common practice on the web for years, but Penguin doesn’t like it and punishes sites that have many non-niche links.
Again, these are the kind of sites where you do not want your backlinks to appear. If you see a trackback for your site, and follow it to a site that has a tag cloud that looks like the one below, don’t approve it.
Not only is that site going to be punished in SERPs by Penguin, the sites it links to will be hampered as well.
This does not necessarily mean that any site covering a wide range of topics is a poor link source, per se. What it does mean is that when a niche site has many links that do not pertain to its niche, Penguin perceives that as unnatural and spammy. You can use non-niche sites as a link source effectively, and in fact we will get into some ways to do that later on.
4. Lack of Anchor Text Diversity
We talked about how anchor text can affect appearance in search results. Sites where 65-70+% of links are anchored by keyword text tend to be penalized by Penguin. Ideally, a site should have a keyword density of about 50-60% in its anchor text, with the rest of the links being anchored by text that contains calls to action, like “For more details, click here!”
5. Keyword Stuffing
Any site with an extremely high keyword density is viewed by Penguin as web spam, in the same way as the sniper sites we talked about above. While we don’t know for sure how high a keyword density is too high, a general recommendation is to keep it below 4.5% per page. That is the guideline that is used by the WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast, which is discussed in further detail in High Traffic Academy.
A backlink on a site that is stuffed with keywords will not be worth much post-Penguin.
6. High Ratio of Affiliate Links to Content
Penguin and Panda are both desgined to increase the overall quality of content that the user sees. Since users don’t really enjoy have a ton of affiliate ads shoved in their faces with no real content to help them with their search, sites that have too many affiliate links and too little content are not looked upon favorably.
Trying to establish backlinks on any of these six types of sites is a bad idea. Not only are they poor link sources to draw in an audience, your site will wind up suffering in page ranks. Efforts to backlink on auto blogs, sniper sites, or sites with any of the above characteristics will do more harm than good, and you should make a concerted effort to avoid them.
Aside from these harmful link sources, there are some other sources that have been traditionally used for backlinks that are not necessarily penalized by these algorithms – although they can be – but are generally just not very good or efficient. Having backlinks on these types of sites won’t necessarily hurt you in the same way that the above ones will, but they are not very effective and aren’t worth the time and effort to try to establish links.
We will call these “poor link sources” and discuss them next.
Poor Link Sources
Whether they are poorly received by search engines, inefficient or just ineffective, some backlink sources are just plain bad and not worth your time as part of a backlinking strategy. Some of them seem obvious based on everything you have read in this program so far, so we won’t go over every kind of poor link source in depth. Plus, you will have the opportunity to see strong link sources inside High Traffic Academy, so if you just stick to those, your site will be golden.
Still, it pays to know about what things you should avoid, so here are four examples of poor link sources and why you should stay away from them.
Link Pyramids
A link pyramid is a system of backlinks, arranged in tiers by the general “quality” of the site and the volume of backlinks you put on it. A general link pyramid structure goes like this
The bottom of the pyramid is made up of hundreds of links on “low quality” sites that you create, such as blogs on free hosts and Squiddo lenses. These sites consist almost entirely of outbound links, most of which are random and spammy, and some of which point to your other sites.
On the second level of the pyramid are TLD sites on cheap hosting platforms. These sites contain spun, keyword-stuffed content that is generally low quality. Links come into this site from the 1st level, but don’t get back the other way. The links in this site contain anchor text and direct users to the top level of your pyramid.
Here you have your best site(s), on TLDs with professional design. These are the niche authority sites that you want people to visit to begin with.
This is a standard, generic link pyramid. This is a black hat SEO strategy that people have been using effectively for quite some time to drive traffic to their product.
The problem with link pyramids, though, is that they take a ton of work to build – just look at all the sites you have to create! – just to get started. For the amount of traffic you will actually generate with a link pyramid, versus what you could generate with the strategies I will tell you about later, you are getting very little bang for your buck from the pyramid.
Plus, Penguin and Panda are increasingly cracking down on the type of sites that would be in the first two levels of your pyramid anyway, so the strategy can even be counterproductive.
Forum Profile Links
One of main ways people have been trying to get their backlinks “out there” for a long time has been to use forums as a platform, including putting links in forum profiles. That way, every time you post in a forum, your link shows up alongside the post in your mini profile. Or, when people view your profile as someone who posts frequently, they click through to your site.
That’s the thinking, anyway. In reality, forum profile links just aren’t very efficient or effective to be relied on as part of a backlinking strategy. There are other ways to use forums to build backlinks, and we will discuss that later on, but using profile links is not one of them.
Low Page Rank Links
Sites with a low page rank are understandably not a very productive place for your links to be. These sites are not found readily by users because of their low rankings, so as a result you don’t get many impressions from your backlinks. You have better places to spend your backlinking time than dealing with low PR sites.
Follow/No Follow Diversity
In HTML code, a link can be assigned the attribute nofollow, which indicates to search engines that it should not be indexed and therefore it doesn’t get factored into the site’s page rank or spam profile. In code, a link that is designated nofollow.
By default, a link is a “do follow” – meaning search engines will index it – unless it contains the nofollow attribute.
Tired of building backlinks? Looking for other ways to get targeted traffic? How about getting 100,000 targeted visitors to your website today? Impossible? Let me show you how I made $48,333 in a single week - click HERE.