When the Google Penguin update went live back in April, sites with low-quality link portfolios where hit the hardest. While a few bad links isn’t usually enough to undo all the good SEO that you do, too many bad links could seriously damage your website in the long run. Here are four types of bad links that site owners should watch out for and try to avoid getting involved in:
1. Links on unrelated sites.
While you don’t have to build inbound links from sites that exist in the exact same niche as you, it’s important that you build links from related sites. For instance, a marketing automation software company could easily build links on a plethora of marketing related websites and blogs, but it wouldn’t make any sense for them to get a link from a site that sells playground equipment. The two niches have absolutely nothing in common and don’t even speak to the same audience. If your link portfolio has too many unrelated sites in it the search engines might flag your site for web spam. Obviously you can’t control who links to you or your content, but there is no need to waste time getting on links on unrelated sites just for the sake of adding a few extra links to your portfolio. It’s much better taking a little more time to get good, quality, related links.
2. Links in footers.
Links in the footer of another site can land your site in hot water mostly because, depending on how many pages that site has, your site could be getting thousands of links from one domain with the exact same anchor text each time. This is not to say that every footer link is bad, but unless you have a good reason to be listed in someone else’s footer (say you link to your parent company or vice versa) be careful how many footer links you have in your portfolio.
3. Link exchanges.
A link exchange is the idea that you link to a site and in return they link to yours. While this may sound like how link building is supposed to work, the difference is link exchanges usually involve two sites that have nothing to do with each other. There is no real value for a site’s visitors to have that link pointing to another site; the link is just there to boost the site’s link portfolio with no regard for the actual quality or purpose of that link. Google explicitly bans link exchanges and other link schemes. Instead of getting involved in a link exchange, build actual business relationships with other companies and cross-promote each other. That kind of linking is part of doing online business and is accepted by the search engines.
4. Blog networks.
Blog networks are another kind of link scheme that was recently taken down by the Penguin update. Blog networks essentially allow you to publish a blog post on different websites that are all linked together automatically. For instance, the marketing software automation company could write a post entitled “5 Benefits of Automating Your Online Marketing Efforts” and the post would automatically be sent to blogs that talk about marketing, online marketing, marketing software, marketing automation and so forth. The point of a blog network was to get extra links for a piece of content without much extra effort. Many blog networks have since been de-indexed by Google after Penguin went live.
5. Buried links.
A buried or hidden link is oftentimes a link that a human visitor might not be able to see, but the search spiders can still crawl. For instance, a website might put a link in white text on a white background so it’s essentially invisible to the human eye but still shows up when the search spiders crawl a site. Other sites might create a page and stuff it with links that isn’t interlinked with the rest of their site in a way that a user could accidentally stumble upon it, but it is included in the XML sitemap so the search engines can still find it. Hidden thinks are considered untrustworthy and deceptive by the search engines because they present different information to the search engines and the end user.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of the types of “bad” links out there that could land your website is hot water. While it’s not always immediately obvious as what differentiates a good link from a bad link it’s important to ask yourself—why am I going for a link on this site? Does this site target the same audience as me? Would I want a site like this to naturally link to me? Make sure each link you build is worth it!