Tame Your Little SEO Devil: Link Building By The Book
September 12th, 2009 | 
Author: 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 hundredthousand 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 everinahurry 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 lowquality 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 autosubmission 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.
About the writer: Sascha Hodges is one of the SEO and copywriting experts at LinkAssistant.Com a larger producer of SEO software since 2005. Holding a degree in Marketing Sascha specializes in search engine optimization and SEO copywriting.
Related posts:
Posted in e-commerce