Ten Unnatural Link Building Tactics You Must Avoid at all Cost

I have posted this on my official site but decided to share it with this community.

Since the panda and penguin updates a lot of things have changed when it comes to SEO. Almost all the link building tactic we know was labeled WRONG, article marketing, paid links, mass blog commenting, blog networks, directory submission name it. Today am going to briefly explain some of the few unnatural link building tactics as well as possible options. Read on.


1. Anchor - The main reasons we all build link is to increase our ranking for our target keywords. Nothing makes a link building tactics looks so unnatural like focusing your anchor on one or a few keywords.
Google knows that natural link building can never target one keyword. For instance if you have a good content on your blog or published on a high article directory, people are very likely to re-publish it on their own site and using your anchor as it is, make use of the brand name or URL. In the nutshell, when you are doing SEO always diversify your anchor text as well as utilize the URL itself.


2. Paid Links - I know you might be wondering why this is WRONG. Well if you have to pay to get links then it’s unnatural. What Google want you to do is to have great content and get it on a few high places where it can be naturally syndicated.


3. Blogroll and Footer Link - The reason why blogroll and footer link is WRONG is because the links comes from the last part of the site which makes it hard or unnoticeable by the search engines and above all it makes the link appear inferior. Normally, website coding begins from Header, Menu, Sidebar, Content and then footer. Having your link in the content/top of a site tells the search engine how important your site is and will be crawled easily.


4. Simple Web Directory Links – If a link is easy to get then there is a high chance that it would link to a bad neighbor especially directories that are auto-approve. Directories that review your content or link before publishing it are very likely to have a clean system.


5. Blog Comment - A lot of people are conversant with (SPAM) mass blog commenting for back link. This is not only annoying for blog owners but it can go uncontrollable if the right step is not taken. This kind of links can send your site down the drain. Blog comment is a great way to get back links and blog owners love to see new comment that is related to their post and very likely to approve it when done correctly. Instead of spamming, simply find a few list of blogs related to your niche at Drop My Link - Find sites to create backlinks on and manually leave a related comment, you will enjoy traffic as well as quality back links that will catapult your ranking.


6. Link Exchange - It is not uncommon to see site offering link exchange services having a resource pages, sites of interest, link exchange request or something similar on their site where interested people can buy. Google greatly frown upon this kind of link tactics and it can get you penalized. Rather than buy this kind of services, it is more SEO wise to individually find sites in your niche and request for link exchange.


7. Content Spinning - Google has been fighting content farm for quite some time now. Writing one content, spinning it into hundreds of copies before distributing it to thousand of article directories and private article networks only provides low quality link. What I recommend here is to write one great content in a topic that will be almost impossible not to read and syndicated, give the content to your blog first then a few guest blogs and top article directories or press release. One of the reasons why you need quality content and also have to give it to directories is because there is a likelihood that it will be syndicated and a link back to you which means POWER to your site.


8. Social Networking - Services like KnowEm makes it easy for folks to create hundreds of social networking site and then spam them. Truth is, you are not going to get any SEO value from this except maybe if you are trying to cover up a reputation issue for your website or product. One good discovery that you must know and lots of people don’t accept is, Google uses social networking to a high degree for SEO. A close examination of Open Site Explorer shows a spot for Facebook Likes, Shares, Tweet, Google + in your back link campaign.
Take the time and setup a good social networking presence for your site in the top social networking sites. A simple tweet of your latest blog post can lead to another re-tweet and webmasters finding your content as well as give you a link back.


9. Focusing on Do Follow Links Is WRONG - This is just another signal that tells the search engine what you are doing is unnatural. Funny enough, there are still a lot of people that only insist on do follow links and nothing more. This can bring about Google dance and also drop in ranking in every new Google update. Always insist on Do and No Follow, it counts.


10. Social Bookmarking - This isn’t a bad idea except for the fact that there are lots of tools and cheap services out there that will bookmark a site to hundreds of social bookmarking sites. Just like the directory case when social bookmarking is not moderated there is a high tendency that bad neighbors can link to them which can bring down your site. It is more beneficial to use top popular social bookmarking sites and create a great profile, build relationship with your users and post variety of links.


I rest my case here.


To all We Success,
John