Backlinks To Avoid - Backlink Lists

Backlinks are good for search engine optimization. In fact backlinks are crucial for SEO, especially if you are after those lucrative keywords.

But there are a number of backlinks that you should seriously avoid. Simply because they could seriously hurt your sites performance in the search engines

In a rather old post on this blog we talked about link farms, bad neighbourhoods and blacklisted sites. These are pretty obvious and, unless you are a total newbie, you would already have figure this out.

But there is another sinister and apparently innocent source of backlinks that could seriously hurt your rankings

The Backlink list

You must have seen them in the forum

"List of 700 blogs with do follow links"

Or

" Auto-approved backlinks, 500 blogs"

Or

"List of do follow forums"

And on the surface of it they look great. And every man and his dog, at least every internet marketer and his outsourced link building guy in the third world will jump on these lists.

But these are websites that you really DO NOT want to get backlinks from.

In analyzing your website and the relevance of your websites in the search engines, Google looks at backlinks pointing to your website. And we all know that we want do follow anchor text links from websites preferably in our niche.

But it goes deeper than that.

From looking closely at how backlinks affect websites, it seems that Google looks at the type of sites that a website links to. If your website is getting a backlink from a webpage that links out to a whole bunch of spammy websites, then your website may generate enough suspicion for closer analysis.

Not a problem if that one site is the only website that is overrun by spammers pointing to your site.

But on analysis of all the backlinks pointing to your website, if the majority of the links are from websites that also point to other spammy websites then the case really is loaded against your website.

So back to those lovely lists of backlinks kindly provided by well meaning colleagues in the forums. Great idea but in reality, probably to be avoided.

Again I do not work for Google and my comments are based purely on observations.