It is no secret that one of the most common ways to boost the ranking of a website is through link building. As with anything else in life, there is a good way and a bad way to build links. Google has all kinds of penalties for those webmasters who do it the “bad” way. Let’s have a look at the topic and, hopefully, help you avoid problems down the road.
Excessive Reciprocal Linking
It’s perfectly fine to link back and forth to your affiliates for the mutual benefit of it all… not. Excessive reciprocal linking, meaning you drop your links to a site, and they drop their links to your site, is widely accepted to be a “bad link strategy” that might get you penalized. If you are in the blogging world, avoid doing that at all costs as it is usually newbie bloggers that take the hit.
Manual Link Spam Penalty
Call it bad luck or one of your competitor’s low balls thrown at you, but it is not always Google bots that do the penalizing. Google has a webspam team that reviews the link profiles of various sites, and while it mostly happens on a random principle, it can sometimes be caused by a rival company that has reported you.
Low-Quality Link Penalty
In link building, not every link helps. Earning your links the right way is how you rank better. Sadly, people get desperate for links sometimes and are practically begging Google to penalize them. How can you avoid this? Earn your backlinks from reputable sites. This will testify to your credibility in front of both audience and bots.
Unnatural Outbound Link Penalty
If you often engage in guest posting and publish lots of your affiliates’ content on your website, be sure to prescreen the articles you upload. If they contain an abundance of links from low-quality websites or spammy ones, have that article revised. Do not allow “no follow” links on your site!
Needless to say, getting penalized for the link profile of your site can have a detrimental effect on your reputation and ranking. No matter why you got the penalty, you should always strive to avoid them in the first place. Make use of ethical link building practices, and you can not go wrong that way. If this sounds like a lot of work, our SEO company can help. At 411 Locals, we dedicate our efforts to bringing all our clients the online success their businesses deserve!
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