Jay LeonardLink building is not exempted from the popular adage that says “The only constant thing in this world is change.”
There are so many changes in link building strategies that Google no longer accepts. Since the Google Panda and Penguin updates, most of these no longer work for search engine optimization.
The following are the link building strategies that used to work in the past but no longer work with today’s search engines:
1. Low Quality Content
The Web is filled with articles that are written purely for link building purposes. It is easy to identify these small caliber – low quality content rich articles based on the way they are written. There are a number of websites and platforms set up to approve articles based on randomly generating a topic. This is horrible for the organization of the website, and the quality of the content itself. Article spinning is another huge factor that results in low quality content. There are many article spinning programs out there that will likely do more harm than good.
2. Unusual Anchor Text
The former standard of link building used to consist of an anchor text link that was
(keyword rich in nature) on a quality website. However, this has changed with the recent Google algorithm updates. Your site will easily lose ranking in the search engine results page (SERP) if you have too many unnatural-looking anchor text links. The key to avoiding this is to use various types of anchor text such as head term keywords, and long tail keywords. You have to make sure that you avoid a backlink profile that is filled with repetitive anchor text.
3. Domains that are Exact Matches
Google used to give high SERPS to exact match domains. However, Google has recently made a change that will reduce the rank of exact match domains that are of poor quality. Seo.com is such an example of an exact match domain since it consists of an anchor text that the site desires to rank for. The former trend was that if you had an exact match term found in your URL, you would inevitably rank higher in the SERPS versus those websites that didn’t. This has greatly changed with the recent algorithm shifts.
4. Article Sites
Link builders used to post a host of articles on general article sites and obtain links from them. However, this method has also been negatively affected with these recent changes. An article site that does not screen the articles it accepts will contain mass amounts of bad content. A site with bad content ultimately results in a poor website. You have to post articles on websites that are authoritative, related to your niche, or post to sites with bloggers having the relative influence over these topics.
5. Footer/Sidebar Links
One of the most effective link building strategies (that used to work) was footer and sidebar links. However, using these Post Google Panda/Penguin will definitely yield negative results. The reason being is because prior to Google’s algo updates, websites used to sell other websites links that could be placed sitewide. This is a huge no-no in the eyes of Google.
A common practice for webmasters today is to post a link in the footer (as a way of advertising) to all of the visitors on the website. This looks like paid advertising (to the search engines) and should be avoided.
There are various forms of sidebar links. These include the general blogroll link. This does not cause any harm or help since it is just an internal link list. External sidebar links (that are not good) are those random keywords lists with exact match anchor text in the sidebar of a blog. These appear as paid links to the search engines.
Your link building efforts will be effective if you avoid these 5 ineffective link building strategies.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Jay Leonard.
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In my mind, article sites and footer/sidebar links are at worst neutral but rarely a negative thing. They may be negative if the sites you are getting links on are viewed as bad sites by search engines for some reason. But not getting links on negative sites applies in all cases so it goes without saying.
Also, I wouldn’t consider SEO.com an exact match domain. I would consider it a premium domain. Exact match domain would be something like cheapaffordablewebsites . com or buy-viagra-now . com
It’s becoming so difficult to implement a quality link strategy these days, as the bad link builders are moving to the platforms that use to provide quality links, and after a while Google will just bring down the value of all links from those sites, a good example of this is article directories.
@Eduan I agree. Google seems to make up the rules as they go along. The closer and closer SEO’s get to the algorithm recipe, Google deprecates that specific link building tactic.
Site Wide Footer links may be degraded website SERP ranking. So Redirecting Users To the same page where they footer link is the best practice to avoid negative impacts.
@Raj, A footer link is still considered multiple links on one domain. This looks spammy, and should always avoided.