Careful with Your Linkbuilding Strategies

Posted: 24 Jul 2012 07:45 AM PDT

If you haven’t been following the SEO sphere lately here’s what you need to know: Google is starting to push harder against artificial linkbuilding methods, including low quality links, link networks and so on.

Earlier this year Google started sending warnings to websites that were breaking one or more of Google’s policies regarding backlinks. Then we had the Penguin update which supposedly hit many of those websites hard.

The curious thing is that in some cases the penalty coming from those bad links was pretty harsh, and large websites that were penalized were desperate to fix things.

Google’s own advice was to remove those bad links. so the websites started asking for other websites to remove links pointing to them, and threatening to sue if they didn’t! I am not sure if this was clear, but here’s what they were basically saying: “Hey, you know those links you have pointing to my website? While I appreciated them a couple of months ago, I don’t need them anymore, so please remove them or I’ll sue you!”.

Search Engine Land has a very interesting article covering this whole debacle: Insanity: Google Sends New Link Warnings, Then Says You Can Ignore Them. Here’s a quote:

But what if people couldn't get links taken down? The head of Google's web spam team, Matt Cutts, just generally suggested such a thing was possible without giving any specific advice.

This led further support to those who argued that "negative SEO" was now suddenly a real possibility, that any publisher could be targeted with "bad links" and made to plunge in Google's rankings. Google stressed that negative SEO in this way is rare and hard. To this date, negative SEO still hasn't seemed to be a wide-spread problem for the vast majority of publishers on the web.

Those reassurances — along with a Google help page update saying Google "works hard to prevent" negative SEO — hasn't calmed some. Negative SEO has remained a rallying cry especially for many hit by Penguin (and many were deservedly hit) looking for a way to fight back against Google.

Bottom line: don’t resort to artificial linkbuilding schemes, networks or paid links, as sooner or later it will get your website penalized. Sure, natural linkbuilding takes a lot more time and effort, but at least you can be sure it will be worth it in the long run.