Link building SEO – How not to get links

Building links is an important part of SEO and critical to helping your site rank higher in the search engine results.  However, search engines are getting smarter, and many of the old link building SEO tricks are becoming less and less effective.  More than ever the quality of a link can make a big difference in the impact it has on improving your websites ranking.  In fact, some methods of obtaining links could actually hurt your site.  The following are some of the ways not to obtain links.  

Submit your site to frivolous directories:  There are good directories and there are bad directories.  In fact one of the very best directories is the DMOZ Directory.  Because Google uses this directory, listing your company in it is undoubtedly one of the best things you can do as far as link building SEO is concerned.  The Yahoo Directory and Best of the Web Directory are also a couple of other highly authoritative directories.  On the bad side, there are literally hundreds of insignificant directories that typically charge between $10 and $20 a submission.  They have virtually no traffic and no authority and wouldn’t even be worth the effort if they charged just $1 per submission.

Posting on forums:  Like directory submissions there are good posts and bad posts.  Posting on forum threads that are not related to your website or are severely outdated is considered spam.  Additionally posting the same question to 30 different forums is also considered spam, especially if you are a new member, especially if you do it all on the same day.  Creating a profile on a forum that you never intend to be a part of just to get a link to your website is also another form of forum spam.

Commenting on blogs:  Legitimate comments, good.  Comments that aren’t really comments but just your keywords, bad.  It is especially annoying to say nothing of value about the post, but only add a comment directing people to your site for more information.

Poor link exchanges:  Link exchanges or reciprocal linking contributes very little to your link equity.  If two sites are legitimately related and linking to each other is mutually beneficial, then by all means exchange links.  However, for purposes of link building SEO, link exchanges contribute little value.

Link farms:  This is one of the oldest and worst ways of obtaining links.  Link farms are simply websites created for the purpose of linking together with all the other sites in the group.  Search engines are able to identify the attributes that link farms use and can filter them from their search results.  They may even pull the entire domain from their index, and panelize all participating sites.