Be Careful of Link Building Scams

Eric Brantner
SEO Content Writer

If you have Gmail, you’re probably familiar with the targeted advertisements that are constantly thrown your way every time you check your mail. Admittedly, some of these links are of great interest to me. Recently, there was one advertisement that really piqued my interest. It was an ad promising over 1,000 one way links to your website.

The ad reeked of spam, and I just had to dig deeper to find out more about it. Essentially, the site said that if you paid around $100 per month, you could get all the free links you want.

From what I understand, the way it works is everyone submits their website to this directory. Businesses then go through the directory and choose the sites they want inbound links from. To those who don’t know better, this seems like a great way to build backlinks quickly and easily.

But there are several things wrong with this link exchange system.

• Quality of Links- I’ll take 10 high quality links over 1,000 bargain basement links every time. It’s not the number of links that’s so important. Quality trumps quantity nearly every time. It’s fairly safe to assume that the links on this website aren’t from high quality sources. If you’re a site with lots of trust from the search engines, you probably wouldn’t feel the need to sign up for a link exchange scam. No, the websites in this link building directory are more likely low quality, spammy pages trying to take shortcuts.
• Link Relevancy- The relevancy of your inbound links is another important factor in determining how effective they are. A site with a bunch of random, irrelevant websites linking to it looks a bit suspicious. It screams “I’m trying to manipulate the search results” to the search engines. Furthermore, irrelevant links send irrelevant traffic to your site. A quality link will send targeted, quality visitors to your website who are more likely to become customers.
• Paying for Unnatural Links- The bottom line of this advertisement is you are paying for links. Paying to have people link to your website is dangerous and a poor link building strategy. The best links are those you acquire naturally from having great content that people want to link to. Always focus on natural link building, and you’ll be better off for it.