5 Types of Link Building Techniques you Should Avoid

Link building is the most effective way to promote your content, capture good traffic and rank well in the Search engine result page (SERP). Link building requires dedication, consistent effort, and on the top of that, a good knowledge on how to build links that comply with search engine rules, don’t get you penalized and pass the link juice so you can rank well after a certain amount of time. Sadly, not a lot of bloggers pay attention to avoid bad link building behaviors. I observe lot of them  use bad linking techniques every day. The bad link building behaviors may not be identified by search engines in days, even months but at the end, it will ultimately ruin business. So, what are 5 types of

1- Link buying

bad link building behavior you should avoid?

Link buying is quite popular in the webmaster world. If you take a look at Digital point forum, you can easily find people buying and selling links busily.

You should avoid building backlinks this way because:

• It goes against Google rules. In the Webmaster guidelines posted in the Webmaster Central, Google has stated clearly that webmasters should not buy backlinks to increase the popularity of the website. Sometimes, rules are strict, but we better follow it.
• You can’t trust the other site. The site that you are preparing to buy links from may appear to be legitimate website for right now. However, you can’t be sure that the owner will not take his site down a month later. Even more dangerous, that site may become a spam site or a virus-contained site and if your links is put on those sites, you may get penalized by the search engines.
• Inbound links are not diversified. Backlinks should come from as many sources as possible to boost the rank of your page effectively. Buying links will make your backlinks come only from one website, which devalues your backlinks and not worth the money.

2- Reciprocal links.

Once upon a time in internet land, everyone traded links. Blogrolls and link lists are still quite common in the blogosphere but “trading links” is not an acceptable way to build links. Google actually states that “Excessive reciprocal links or excessive link exchanging (“Link to me and I’ll link to you.”)” is in violation of their webmaster agreement.

3- Putting irrelevant links in comment, forum post, etc.

Whenever you come across the spam queue in your blog, you will instantly recognize some comments that seem legitimate, but they are marked at spam because they contain an irrelevant link in the comment section. Here’s what it looks like in my spam queue:



Although putting a link in a comment body may contribute to improve the ranking of your page on a specific keyword, famous bloggers should never take that road to build backlinks because it will hurt your reputation in the long run. Putting the link the comment body makes you look like a spammer, not someone whom can be trusted by the community.

4-Website directories designed to increase rankings.

Directories are a great way to drive traffic to your website, but not all are effective link building tools. If you’re hoping to gain a solid backlink from a directory listing, look for the following characteristics:

• The directory page is included in the website’s navigational links and/or sitemap.
• The page is not using the nofollow or noindex attribute.
• The directory should be a static database rather than dynamic so it is easily read by search robots.
• Organized links arranged in categories or grouped by similar topics. A mish-mash of urls thrown on a page generally signifies spam to the search engines.

Remember that website directories are not bad and can increase traffic to your site – but most will not generate quality backlinks.

5- Links generated by scripts and software.

There are a variety of programs available online that promise to increase backlinks to your website. Typically this is done with a software script that can be set to run automatically, leaving comments on forums and blogs that include your links. These scripts are annoying to other webmasters, are often ineffective because the comments are blocked by spam catchers, and can get your website blacklisted by search engines.

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