For years, link-building was the proverbial golden goose of SEO and SEO management. But through years of abuses and black-hat treachery, links have run afoul of Google’s algorithms. Now the search engine giant looks with great skepticism on any inbound links pointing to your site. And it does so for good reasons.
For years, all kinds of linking schemes cropped up like so many mushrooms. They packed quite a wallop until Google caught up with them and then they didn’t. Today, when toxic links crop up pointing to your website, you run the risk of getting penalized by Google. Trust us, you don’t want that.
It’s important to note that Google has grown to be pretty savvy about which toxic links are actually no fault of the website they point to. But you have to be careful to examine your inbound link health and leave nothing to chance. Disavowing those most nefarious links that leave questions as to whether the website owner is involved in their production is your most important tool in managing the menacing things. These four links are worthy of a good disavow strategy and you should probably keep an eye out for them:
- Links from Low Quality Directories: In the early days of link building, many businesses fell for the great directory farms out there that produced shoddy websites that purported to be reputable online business directories or perhaps the directory submission services out there that offered to post profiles across hundreds of online directories for your business in return for a fee, producing just as many inbound links for shoddy online directories. Google quickly caught on and began penalizing sites with links from such low quality sites. Today, there are still a few reputable business directory websites that add value to your SEO strategy. But it’s advisable to keep the ones you use to a few quality sites.
- Blog Comment Links: Because blog comment links are so easily achieved, it’s become quite toxic for sites to have hundreds of them pointing back to your domain. Google understands the scheme behind many cheap and easy links coming in from blog comment sections all in an effort to manipulate search engine results and it rewards websites accordingly with a nice fat penalty.
- Links by Fiverr or Other Cheap and Easy Link Building Services: This is another badly abused scheme that websites have been penalized in recent years for. Cheap services that take little to nothing to join only in an effort to have a nice, gleaming inbound link pointing back to your site only say to Google algorithms that you don’t really want to put in the work. You only want to trick the search engine into thinking your site is actually authoritative. Just don’t do it.
- Private Blog Networks (PBNs): Private blog networks were once all the rage in SEO. SEOs were once able to use them to randomize your footprint so that Google algorithms wouldn’t detect a pattern in your inbound linking and you would see big gains from these techniques. Today, PBNs on a large scale will trash your site’s organic traffic quicker than you can say “inbound link.” Google eventually detects and punishes most PBNs and when they do, you can expect a stiff penalty for your website.
If you would like to work with Proctor Digital strategists to help develop a powerful SEO strategy to build targeted website traffic for your site and grow your brand, call us at 773.664.5819. We’d love to help!