WHY DO LINK BUILDING

Link building can increase the number of high-quality links pointing to a website, in turn increasing the likelihood of the website ranking highly in search engine results. Link building is also a proven marketing tactic for increasing brand awareness

KIND OF LINK BUILDING1. Link for Link2. Money for Links3. Goods or Services for Links4. Guest Posting5. Automatically Generated Links6. Widget Links7. Advertorials8. Text Advertisements that pass PageRank9. Articles & Commercial Anchor Text10. Web-Directory Links11. Footer links12. Sitewide links13. Blogroll links

KIND OF LINK BUILDING14. Forum & Blog Comments15. 100% Do-Follow Links16. Anchor Text Over-optimization17. Geographically Irrelevant Links18. Contextually Irrelevant Links19. Link Velocity Spikes20. Article Directories21. Link Networks22. Press Releases23. Bookmark Sites24. Resource Pages25. Sites that Sell Links26. Social Profile Links

LINK FOR LINK I’m referring here at

exchange methods of link building. For example, if you’re a car sales rep and you have links to several car service centers and insurance brokers around your area and they link back to you, it will probably won’t raise any suspicions.

MONEY FOR LINKS Offering money in

exchange for links or content that incorporate links is one of the most obvious methods to acquire unnatural links. One form of practice that is not that pronounced is obtaining links to your site after offering a donation

GOODS OR SERVICES FOR LINKS

If the method of exchanging money for links is straight forwarded, there’s a thin line regarding bartering between services or goods and links

GUEST POSTING Recently added in

the not-so-select group of unnatural link tactics, guest posting may be harmful for your website if it’s done improperly

AUTOMATICALLY GENERATED LINKS

It’s sounds like a sweet deal when someone offers to build bulks of links over night on certain targeted keywords

WIDGET LINKS The person that

created the plugin has the possibility to inject links on all the sites that have that respective plugin installed.

ADVERTORIALSAdvertorials are articles that are published by sites as a form of advertisement. Google may consider this as a form of paid link tactic IF the links that point back to your site are not tagged as nofollow

TEXT ADVERTISEMENTS THAT PASS PAGERANK

Same story as in the case of advertorials. They may be considered as unnatural when they are left as do-follow and they directly influence the site’s ranking in the search engine

ARTICLES & COMMERCIAL ANCHOR TEXT

It’s a good thing that people write about your product or service and link back to your website. As long as a person creates links in a natural way

WEB-DIRECTORY LINKS

People used to abuse these type of sites by placing links on hundreds of web directories. If your site’s link portfolio has mostly these kind of links you might get the unwanted attention of the Webspam Team

FOOTER LINKSA tactic popularized by web design agencies & used by them to increases their site’s visibility in the search engines, was to put links in the footer of their client’s pages with the wording such as “Designed by”

SITEWIDE LINKSWhen you create sitewide links GoogleBot is going to see the link on almost every page of the website. One or two site-wide links won’t raise any suspicion but if you’re going to abuse this feature, most likely Google will place it under the unnatural links category

BLOGROLL LINKSA technique that’s been around and abused just as long as the one with the web-directory links. There’s nothing harmful if you have 1-2 links and they are placed on relevant blogs

FORUM & BLOG COMMENTSComments on forums and blogs are often used as a way to get yourself known in the community. You relate to other people’s content and you create a conversation.

100% DO-FOLLOW LINKSIt’s not likely for a site to have 100% do-follow links. Usually, a natural backlink profile has a homogenous mix of do-follow and nofollow. People often create comments on do-follow blogs as a way of link building

ANCHOR TEXT OVER-OPTIMIZATION

The anchor text keyword cloud must be diverse in order to look natural. If you don’t want Google to penalize your website we suggest staying as far away as possible from over-optimized anchor text structures

GEOGRAPHICALLY IRRELEVANT LINKS

Let’s say you have a local business that sells ice cream in Miami. It’s highly doubtable that you’re being naturally linked to web-directories localized in Croatia. When Google encounters a lot of links that have this discrepancy

LINK VELOCITY SPIKES

When you have big velocity spikes, either daily or monthly, compared with your overall website history averages, it means either something important happened in that period, or your site is trying to manipulate the site’s ranking in the search engines.

ARTICLE DIRECTORIES

Article directories such as EzineArticles are a source of low quality articles. Their only purpose on the internet is to generate pages with do-follow links in their content. Because this type of link building strategies can be automated

LINK NETWORKSPrivate blog networks (in general) are sites that are using different IP addresses which are owned by the same person, who controls them and posts articles with do-follow links at his own discretion

PRESS RELEASESAn abused strategy which gives webmasters the opportunity to use sites like Prweb to publish press releases (with the same content) on hundreds of sites, in order to create do-follow links back to them

BOOKMARK SITESThese type of sites allow users to place personal bookmarks. If you have an abundance of links coming from this area, it means you’re using these sites as a link building strategy and you want to influence your site’s rankings in the search engines.

RESOURCE PAGESAn ancient form of link building strategy , which refers to certain pages from the site that look like “/links.html”, filled with links to a variety of non-related pages

SITES THAT SELL LINKSOn these type of websites, if you stop paying, your link will be removed from the site, and in it’s place will be another one. Google looks at sites that are constantly creating and deleting links from their site, and may figure out if someone is selling links

SOCIAL PROFILE LINKSIf you create 100 accounts on different social networks, and they all link to your website, it’s may be sign of an unnatural link tactic. From what Google declares, these links are used only for indexing, so they won’t have a direct influence over the results order in the search engine.