Warning: Your Link Profile May Suck in Google's Eyes

[James Dean Nash]

Your link profile may suck if you base your linkbuilding campaign soley on"

1.)Mass Directory Submission...
Submitting your website to hundreds of low quality directories is a waste of time and money IMO if they have the following characteristics:

They accept every website that gets submitted and have no type of quality or editorial control.
The directory is blatantly selling links... You'll see links to other websites in the footer, sidebar etc..
They have been slapped in the past (http://www.avivadirectory.com/)Try: http://www.incrawler.com http://www.business.com http://www.greenstalk.com http://familyfriendlysites.com/ http://dir.yahoo.com/ http://botw.org/

Their are more directories but these will help you to establish trust and that you have a quality website because their is an editorial process. So if your accepted in the directory, then in Google's eyes you don't have a spam site or you wouldn't be in the directory... make sense?

2.)Blogroll, Footer, Wordpress theme and Sitewide links:
Purchasing multiple blogroll, sitewide links etc on websites is detected and discounted by the Algorithm

Why?

Because Google knows that these are areas of abuse for people buying and selling links especially if their not relevant too. Just take a look around. Also people report these paid links and give Google even more insight of what type of links to look for and discount.

3.)Blog commenting

Blog commenting IMO is pretty close to worthless for SEO but may bring traffic. Stuffing your keyword in a comment that may not ever get approved isn't worth your time and effort. Even Google knows that. Google can detect and discount these type of links because they are known to be areas of spam and abuse. So at best the links have been highly discounted.

Now I am not saying you can't rank your website using these methods but it's going to take you alot more work to rank for more competitve keywords.

The types of links that you do need are editorial controlled links and links that are not in known areas of abuse.

[kbeus21]

Good post, I have found that using keyword luv has helped some, but not nearly as much as I thought it would. I definatley stay away from directories that don't manually review and buying links goes against google guidelines. Personally I have found the best links come from article submission and guest posting. These two also help to become an expert in a niche and if your able to get the respect free one way backlinks will follow. Any good job pointing out some of the places to avoid when link building.

[Daffy Duck]

thanks man.. nice post....

[Ryan@SEOBackup]

Link building is about variety. A natural, uninterfered with backlink profile will have links from all corners of the web. Your goal as an SEO is to emulate that artificially.

Bookmarking, blog comments, forum posts, incontent links, footer links, blogroll links, press releases, article marketing, classifieds, directories. . .

[GlowStormLion]

Solid post!

I think the concept that's starting to arise here is we, as site builders/operators, have to start envisioning our sites as having an 'image' in the search engines if we want those search engines to continue bringing us traffic. They're just robots at this point, but clearly Google's goal is to approach artificial intelligence levels of 'sentience'. Not to be sci fi about things, but that's how it appears to me.

So what does that mean? If we promote our sites as if there's a human examining them then we'll probably avoid the more embarrassing types of promotion... and that ends up being the spammy stuff. Right now, it seems that people shamelessly promote because "Oh well, it's just an algorithm, a robot"... but in the future I feel that's going to become more and more fruitless. Our sites have 'reputations' based on who's linking to them and where they're linking to. In order to stand out, I think we've got to keep our eye on the ball, which (to me) is pleasing the end visitor, not the mechanical/technological tool through which they find our sites.

That's the key is keeping that 'profile' that JDN's talking about in mind... If we think past SEO alone, I think we're capable of building sites that'll function more productively and promoting them with far more efficient techniques.

Just my 2c

[sexymassage]

Good post, but how can we get high quality back links? It is really a big problem for me.

[sexymassage]

Good post, but how can we get high quality back links? It is really a big problem for me.

[tyler_durden]

James Dean Nash,
So are you saying that we need to pay for better serp's? It will cost over $500 to get listed in those 6 directories you mentioned, and some of them are only yearly listings and you need to pay again.

I completely understand what you are saying, but I don't believe those directories will help you that much compared to the cost. Do you agree or disagree? If you only could choose one or 2 directories that you listed, which ones are the best bang for your buck?

[rmotive]

Also, keep in mind that one important thing is the content on your site. You can have all the links in the world, and you won't rank if your content is garbage.

[James Dean Nash]

James Dean Nash,
So are you saying that we need to pay for better serp's? It will cost over $500 to get listed in those 6 directories you mentioned, and some of them are only yearly listings and you need to pay again.

I completely understand what you are saying, but I don't believe those directories will help you that much compared to the cost. Do you agree or disagree? If you only could choose one or 2 directories that you listed, which ones are the best bang for your buck?

No you don't need to pay for serp's but if you want to have a better chance at ranking better and gaining more trust then yeh'....

I understand alot of people cannot afford these directories and thats understandable, but if I had to choose I'd go with yahoo directory and business.com ......

You need to have a wide link profile ....but soley focusing on footer links, blogrolls, sitewide links etc IMO just isn't enough..


Link building is about variety. A natural, uninterfered with backlink profile will have links from all corners of the web. Your goal as an SEO is to emulate that artificially.

Bookmarking, blog comments, forum posts, incontent links, footer links, blogroll links, press releases, article marketing, classifieds, directories. . .

This is true, however if you focus soley on the ones I stated in the post then ranking is going to be a task....

[5593907]

I agree that variety is the way to go. Doing too much link building in one particular area always seems to somewhat backfire on me as my pages go down in rank instead of up.

I think Ryan said it best above "Your goal as an SEO is to emulate that artificially."

[sultanofseo]

2.)Blogroll, Footer, Wordpress theme and Sitewide links:
Purchasing multiple blogroll, sitewide links etc on websites is detected and discounted by the Algorithm .

it is true that these type of links are discounted, they are not penalized so they still work to some extent. only 2-3 years ago we could rank high getting sitewide links from few large sites with thousands of pages. this doesn;t work any longer but few links form that domain still counts


3.)Blog commenting

Blog commenting IMO is pretty close to worthless for SEO

i beg to differ. i see people ranking very well using purely blog commenting as a mehtod of link building. while most of the people offering blog commenting on DP provides worthless serivce as i myself tried several of them, if you can post on-topic comments on relevant blogs, they still work like charm

[Luc]

If I were Google, I'd discount links coming from signatures because those obviously don't tell anything about hte value of the site. But I'd take into account links in comments in forums that are on-topic. Wonder if they will make a distinction.

[qingsong]

Nice warning, can you show me some good ways to build links for website?

[goodfta]

I totally agree from a SEO standpoint mass spamming to 100's of free directories that are overly saturated with postings is worthless, it doesnt even really register as a backlink and brings 0 traffic to your site.

[GeoGeo]

Thanks for the post

[pcz]

nowadays google penalizes for everything :-L

[James Dean Nash]

i beg to differ. i see people ranking very well using purely blog commenting as a mehtod of link building

I never said it couldn't be done.... i said "Now I am not saying you can't rank your website using these methods but it's going to take you alot more work to rank for more competitve keywords."

Yes you can still use these methods but look for other ways as well cuz these methods are dated and abused...theirfore discounted....

[tyler_durden]

James Dean Nash,
I just want to say nice blog, even though it looks like it's only days old. Good content!

[James Dean Nash]

James Dean Nash,
I just want to say nice blog, even though it looks like it's only days old. Good content!

it's only about a week old and thanks! :) .... after selling my dog store (http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1344165) I figured I'd start me a blog since I have a bit more free time and resources to back me up for awhile...

[GlowStormLion]

JDN: I find it hilarious that I got your Project ROI last year, put it to use and turned $30 and sweat labor into $1,200+ in less than a year.. then I made a thread here on DP about it and it lived (getting massive reads, btw!) for a coupla weeks then randomly got shut down... I just don't understand why things go this way. I ended up starting a blog for our project, just to keep it going.

Oh well :) I'm not complaining but sometimes it seems like people would rather see the glass broken on the floor than half empty OR half full...

[KathyMillerL222]

Hey it is nice warning, However, I am sure there are guys who had got success only with blog commentings as well as deep inner page link building. I think, we have to spend about US$500 to get publish our link over there in your reference, Am I righrt? Ok man, Instead of spendig about US$500 to get 5 WORTHY links, getting 500 quality inbound links for US$200 will make senese in words of google as well as other search engines. Am I right?

[James Dean Nash]

Hey it is nice warning, However, I am sure there are guys who had got success only with blog commentings as well as deep inner page link building. I think, we have to spend about US$500 to get publish our link over there in your reference, Am I righrt? Ok man, Instead of spendig about US$500 to get 5 WORTHY links, getting 500 quality inbound links for US$200 will make senese in words of google as well as other search engines. Am I right?

Their are lots of ways at looking at link building... You can have links from nobody's or you can have links from somebody's.. I know what has worked for me....

[monfis]

Good post, but how can we get high quality back links? It is really a big problem for me.

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=1305452

[praetserge]

I beg to differ
1. Directories - maybe they're becoming absolete but they're still good for pr and get your site indexed. Manual submission is not worth it though. I got directory submitter and let's you submit to 350 directories for free. It's a good start, taking into account that my site got pr3 after first pr update thanks to them.
2. Blogrolls - could be usefull in it's your niche and not many links there. I'm still trying to get a few blogroll links as they're good to some extent.
3. Commenting - definitely helps your ranking (taking into account it's on related blogs). One note, some blogs have comments page thus they're not really helpfull but some have comments just beneath the post and you get a link from relevant and sometimes high pr page.
Article submission? it's ok to some extent, just ask yourself - how often do you read those articles? I bet, not often so why would SE's rank you high for them.
Forum sigs? I agree with Luc, they should be discounted as they are NOT natural links. but links from the body of the post is good. Forums have one advantage as they bring traffic as well.
Finally, just in my opinion, you should use all of these link building methods to some extent as they're different and give your linkbuilding campaign a more natural look.

[florpeps]

That is why I concentrate more on traffic and not on getting my site rank. Most of earnings usually comes from good enormous traffic. Thanks James!


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[Morrow66]

I disagree blog commenting works fine for me with article submission

[MrPJH]

i don't know why people buy links and spend money i have got PR 2 in just 10 days and i think there are 20 to 50 back links on different domains
you can check its PR value located link in my signature as free lancer talk forum and you can see before 31 may there was nothing only adsence for domain
i know that links effects and they are necessary
but why directories get paid because we are paying them and they know you will pay them so just use other ways to market like article submission and communities where Links may b No Follow
use only forums for DoFollow back links

[petes1980]

I think at the end of the day, its all about relevancy. Links on relevant sites will be worth getting whether its through commenting, article submissions, forum links, directories....whatever. Google is always working hard to eliminate "spammy" links and any links you get now that are unrelated are likely to be worthless or the juice will be short-lived.

I try and vary my link building as much as possible but all the time keeping relevancy as the most important factor to decide if the link is worth the effort or not.

I also as yet do not pay for links as i think again they are subject to being discounted which then becomes a waste of money, or with the likes of yahoo directory and business.com, they are just far too expensive for the results you get. I will concede i am no expert in the effectiveness of buying links so this statement might be wrong, but i so far have not had the need to buy any links.