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Thursday, September 8

When a Link turns into a Noose!

Hopefully you have read my previous article and understand how link building can help your search engine marketing campaign.

There are some pitfalls for the young and naive search engine marketer, which are worthy of mentioning.

Do not do any of these tactics:

Going too rapidly: do not just go submitting to any and every directory you can find in a wild frenzy of submission. This type of super aggressive link building raises warning bells for search engines because it looks like these links have been obtained too quickly. This could get you Google Sandboxed (which I am not going to talk about because that is a whole other issue)
Buying Links: If you are buying links for the sake of buying links, stop. Do not pass go, do not waste your money. Are you going to make a positive ROI out of this investment? If not, don't waste your money. But wait, you say what about the value of the PR link? If you can't prove the value, then it doesn't exist. If you wish to waste your money, then send it to me.
Blog Spam: Do not use a blog spamming tool. If you do not know what this is, then great! I am not going to educate you. However, if you get approached with an offer similar to "buy 1000s of quality links overnight" then this is most probably blog spam. Do not do it. The blogging community thanks you for not spamming them.
Email Spam: Send emails to spam (email) lists requesting that they link to you. Enough said on this topic.

Link building is a powerful search engine marketing tactic. Abuse it and it will work against you.

I will go through how to get quality links in a future article.

3 Comments

At 11:45 AM, Anonymous said...: You left out one important DON'T.

Don't waste your time getting links from sites who do not use html text links to link back to you.

I did get a number of good quality links when I first started. Over the next 12 months nearly every one of them changed from a text link to a database lookup or javascript.
You guessed it, the sandbox effect was long and hard to live with.

99% of emailed requests I receive for links only offer back this useless type of link.

TIP
Never check your 'link back' from the url link they send in the email. Visit the home page and see if you can find the link. If you can't find it, there is a good chance that the search engines will also give up and never index the page on which they have so 'generously' offered you a link. If the url they offer contains a ? then you know that search engines are unlikely to ever find the page to see your link.
At 3:03 PM, KnowledgeableIdiot said...: Nice comments above. Its interesting to note too that Microsoft's Dev tools create massive websites with hundreds of data driven dynamic pages that have the ? in them.

So links from these pages where there is no sitemap in place is questionable particularly if there are more than 2 parameters after the ?

BigT
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www.yourownstores.com
www.1shoppingcart.com
www.celebvideos.biz
At 3:06 PM, Anonymous said...: Warren, definately a better article this time.

Look out for link offers from individuals who have used either robot.txt to NOT include the folder where the linking page is, or who have used a rel nofollow tag either in the link itself or as a directive at the top of the page.

All of the above will invalidate a perfectly good looking link.

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www.brighterwhites.com