Types of back links to avoid

If you know a little bit about SEO you know that back links are one of the major components to getting your site noticed and ranked. But are there negative back links that could be harming your site rather than benefiting it?

With Google’s Penguin and Panda update this year, many of these sites with low quality back links have completely dropped off the search engine results pages and those with high quality back links, even just a few, rose to the top. So how do you know what is a high-quality on what the low quality back link and how do you avoid the low quality ones?

Here’s some type of links to avoid:

Link farms

This is typically a group of websites all linking to each other. There’s no real meat or good content on any of them; it simply reciprocal linking back and forth and many sites will have pages and pages of nothing but link after link after link. Google only likes 100 or less links per page anyway and when they see a list of links and they follow those links and see the same type of information on another page they will start to penalize the sites by lowering their rankings.

Paid links

This is not the one or two links that someone is offering you $20 for somewhere on your site which is so minor that Google won’t care; this is paying an SEO company or link campaign company to buy thousands and thousands of links for you from extremely low quality link farms or blogs. Again, if someone approaches you with a related website and says, “I would like to pay you $20 or $30 if you would put a link or a phrase with my link on your website somewhere”, which is totally your prerogative, this usually won’t get you into trouble. (Heck, it’s a good way to make 20 bucks) but if you did this thousands of times and there’s more of these type of links on your website than actual content for your readers, Google will start to de-rank your website and those you’ve given the link to. And Vice-Versa

Guest blogging

Let me preface this by saying that guest blogging is perfectly legit and a great way to get more content onto your site as long as the content is high quality! I can’t stress that enough. If you are collecting low quality content from outsourced and overseas writers that have no idea what the current market is doing, incorrectly spells words and their grammar is all over the board, plus it’s on topics that nobody cares about or would ever read, this is only hurting your website. If you’re having other people blog on your website make sure they blog about information that someone would really want to read.

Low quality blogs

If you have a website that literally has two blogs that you put out 3 ½ years ago, it doesn’t matter how many links you have pointing to it, Google will think that it’s just a social bookmarking site. The more blogs and content you build up on your website the higher quality your entire website becomes so that even interlinking from one blog to another within your same website gives it just as much authority as a link from someone else’s website.

And remember, if ALL your back links come from one source , your content can seem low quality as well. Share, Like, Plus, Link – It all adds up