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The second installment of our SEO tips section, this entry looks at bad links, also known as “unethical link building”.

Link building is an important aspect of search engine optimisation - a large weight is given to links pointing to your site by search engines - this means that the links to your site can impact your search engine rankings.

Although not all links are “good” for your site, it should be noted that it is very difficult for someone to abuse this by pointing lots of “bad” links to your site - ie your competitors can’t get your banned or penalised.

So what are “bad” links?

Bad links are those that search engines refer to as “coming from bad neighborhoods”.  This is a reference to an earlier age in search engine optimisation where SEOs would setup an entire network of sites, all of which would link to each other and boost each other’s search engine rankings.

Search engines have since implemented measures to identify these “link networks” and as such getting links from a spam network could associate your site with it.

These blatant techniques should be avoided as they simply have no long term benefit for your business.

Shades of grey

Not all links are bad - some are just not very good for your site.  For example, techniques like mass article distribution may seem like an easy way to build lots of links to your site, but the relative effectiveness of this technique is very low.

Think about it logically - your article is duplicated over many websites, all of which basically have the same content - very dry and generic stuff.  Why would a link from these pages carry much weight with search engines (ie, compared to a link from a large news website)?

A lot of sites that publish duplicated content are considered to be of a very low quality as they automatically publish material with no editorial control.

The issues lies with mass press release distribution (online), which also has the issue that many releases are distributed via RSS feeds - meaning that there are some short term links to your site, which fade away over time (as RSS feeds tend to only display x amount of recent items).

However, the shade of grey arises when these techniques offer good traffic - people who are interested in what you had to say and want to visit your site.  So there is room for “grey” techniques, but it shouldn’t form the focus of your link building campaign.

Some link building tips

• Don’t focus on one particular “technique” - a broad strategy using many techniques is much more effective.
• Don’t simply copy what other people do - there’s an insane amount of people out there that don’t know what they are doing!
• Keep it relevant - try to get links from similar or related sites.  So if you are a recruitment agency, then look to get links from career advice websites, etc.
• Generic sites (eg directories) can be good for links to, but shouldn’t be relied on.
• Deep links (links that point directly to internal pages on your site) are useful, but shouldn’t be sought at the expensive of other link building techniques.

eFlaunt offer a completely ethical link building service, making use of our years of experience in the SEO industry.  Contact us for more information.

MG

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35291

Well worth a read if you are choosing an SEO agency.