SEO is constantly evolving but one things seems to remain constant over time – Backlinks! Backlinks are the main backbone of SEO and it has played a major role in the way the relevancy of a content/site is ranked on search engines and as such has been considered very important in SEO. But not every backlink strategy is helpful, while some strategies could help you gain quality backlinks and rank for a certain keyword, other strategies will only get you penalized.
Backlink is a major ranking factor for websites on Search engines but Google and other search engines changed the game when they said its is no more the number of backlinks that points to a site rather the quality and variety of the backlinks that matters. However, not every backlink is helpful for your website. After Google penguin updates, many techniques for getting backlinks became illegal, so today in this article i want to show you the 6 types of backlinks you must avoid so as not to get penalized by Google or other search engines.
6 Types of Backlinks You Should Avoid
Exchanged Links
After penguin updates, Google has started to penalize websites that excessively exchange links. With link exchange, you are not only under risk of being penalized by Google, these links can also drive your visitors away from your website because Internet users tend to follow links. Even though there are workarounds to avoid Google penalties when exchanging links,I would not recommend link exchange. Usually, you can’t get relevant link that would boost your rankings in link exchange, but you can get penalized.
Paid Links
In its quality guidelines, Google has stated that paid links are type of search results manipulations and therefore, websites that buys links will be penalized. Google has blacklist of websites that sell links. If Google finds a blacklisted website linked to your website, you will get penalized. Also, it’s very hard to find relevant links for sale, so buying links is not worth the risk.
Comment Spam
Posting comments on relevant blogs can be useful to drive traffic to your website. They are also useful for your website rankings (although their value is low), but posting comments on a wrong places can harm your website’s ranking. Before posting your comment you should check these things:
1. Number of comments (avoid blogs with lots of comments)
2. Are comments moderated (avoid blogs that don’t moderate comments)
3. Does blog lists recent comments (recent comments listing creates site-wide links.)
You should also make sure your blog is protected from comment spam to prevent spammers linking to bad sites, which would hurt your website’s rankings.
Site-wide Links
Google hates site-wide links. Although, site-wide links usually don’t result in penalty (if they are not on penalized site), they will warm your website’s rankings, especially for keyword used as link anchor text.
Link Directories
Submitting your website to link directories usually don’t result in penalty. However, these links are almost certainly useless. Relevancy of these links is very low because of number of different links in directory. Even reputable directories like DMOZ are useless. I saw that in directory many categories even don’t get Page ranks. So avoid any type of automated link directory submissions.
Profile Links
Although it’s very easy to get link back from various social network profiles, they don’t carry any value (and you’re risking penalization by Google). You may only include links to your website on social networks that you actually use, so your friends can easily reach your site. If you plan to open account only to link to your website, don’t waste your time!
Must Read: How to get quality backlinks from Google+, LinkedIn and Tumblr
Conclusions:
Avoid the 6 types of backlinks discussed above so as not to get penalized by the search engines. I have always encouraged manual and natural backlinks in this blog, publish quality contents and get natural backlinks for it, avoid any sort of automated backlink strategy, it won’t help you rank high, it will only bring you troubles from search engines. The relevancy of a web content is not determined by the number of backlinks anymore but by the quality and variety of backlinks pointing back to that content.
I hope you find this article interesting enough to share with your folks, use the share buttons to share this article with your friends so as to ward them to avoid the above listed types of backlinks. Let me hear what you think about the 6 types of backlinks to avoid, use the comment box below to share your views about this topic. Remember to subscribe to my RSS feed.
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