Friday 16 May 2008

Links That Will Hurt Your Site

Backlinks are the backbone of search engine optimization. And we as affiliate marketers are encouraged to build as many backlinks as we possibly can.

The need to generate backlinks has lead to the evolution of black hat SEO and all it's trappings and I will tell you this, some of these black hat methods are innovative. [Innovative, though they may be, blackhat is highly discouraged here.]

The power of backlinks is so great that people can sell links from their high page rank web pages for a respectable sum of money

In your quest for backlinks to your money making sites, a note of caution.

SOME LINKS WILL HURT YOUR SITE.

Google's aim is to deliver high quality results to people who use their search engine. And they will protect this at all costs. They are therefore constantly on the look out for sites that do not appear natural in their spectrum of ranking characteristics especially backlinks

Backlinks to your site should be from websites in a relevant niche and should occur naturally.

So here are a few examles of backlinks that could hurt your site

  • Bad backlinks 1: link farms. I really do not care how craftily you build your link farm, The big G will eventually find you out and heavily penalize you.

  • Bad backlinks 2: porn sites. We all know the large amount of traffic porn sites get and it may seem like a good idea to try and divert some of that traffic by putting a link on the site. However unless your site is in some way related to the porn industry, don't do it.

  • Bad backlinks 3: Abnormal backlink patterns. A website that suddenly gets 200 backlinks in one day or backlinks all from the same website or IP block just is not natural. Something is up. And if you think that Google will not notice this, you can forget it. When building backlinks to your site maybe through forum participation or blog commenting, add only a few links a day in a steady and natural manner

  • Bad baclinks 4: Irrelevant niches. I don't have any evidence that links from unrelated sites can hurt you but i am not sure that backlinks from sites that are not relevant will help your cause either. You could spend that energy on links that do matter

I know that there is a lot of debate in the affiliate marketing forums [ if you are not a member of a forum you need to join one now. There is a wealth of information, mostly good in the forums. You can find a really good big traffic forum by clicking here. It's free to join], anyway to get back on point, there is a lot of debate on what links can hurt your website and some people actually say that they do not believe that some inbound links can hurt you.

All I say to this is this, is safeguard your money making sites and be careful in choosing site you get your backlinks from

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

thanks for this useful post ;)

Jan said...

This post makes a lot of sense. Thanks for pointing out some flaws that we are inclined or tempted to overlook sometimes.