Posts tagged as:

automated links

Relevant Links Do Not Help!

by admin on December 5, 2009

relevant links Relevant Links Do Not Help!

Well, I admit that the title really is not true. I just wrote this title in a way which would get attention. But I have a point to make in this post.

A lot of SEO service providers (myself included) think that inbound links to your website which come from relevant pages provide a huge boost to your website authority and rankings. This definitely makes sense because Google itself implies that it rewards relevant inbound links.

However, although relevant links are helpful, they are not as helpful as you might think. Here are some points which help in making the case:

1. Terry from the Warrior Forum started a 60 day experiment thread in which, through evidence he concluded that non-relevant and relevant links help in exactly the same way. Read more about it here.

2. In my personal experience I have never used relevant backlinks because they are difficult to find and I am a little lazy. I have always used links which came from authority websites but are not relevant at all! Results? I am ranking in the top 5 for extremely competitive keyword terms with 3-4 months of SEO work.

3. All the successful websites out there have 95% of  their inbound links coming from non-relevant websites. I have yet to see a successful website which has more than 20% relevant inbound links. It just does not happen.

4. The thing is, if you focus only on relevant links, you will most likely leave 90% of the other general links out there which happen to be of good quality. This results in you using less number of links.

5. How does Google determine relevancy? Is the on-page content useful or does it use the data for the whole website? This always leads to a heated discussion so we really have no way in figuring out how relevant “relevant” content really is.

6. All the successful SEO firms out there focus on inbound links from high authority websites and not necessarily from relevant websites.

7. Customers who want relevant links think that they help a lot more with the rankings and for that reason are ready to pay 4X more for the links. SEO companies who want to make some extra cash can always supply the customers with these links, knowing fully well that these links do not really help any more than the “normal” inbound links.

My conclusion is: Relevant and non-relevant links help you just the same.

If you agree or disagree, let me know by commenting!

Incoming search terms for the article:

Tagged as: automated links, inbound links, link building, non-relevant links, relevancy, relevant links

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Can Junky Links Get You Penalized?

by admin on August 15, 2009

penalties Can Junky Links Get You Penalized?

Here is the problem: Google wants you to believe that inbound links to your website cannot really get you penalized. I believe they can. I have seen websites getting penalized many times by getting a lot of automated links, not varying anchor texts and simply building thousands of links in one day (if it is a new website).

A lot of SEO “experts” believe that the worst thing an incoming link can do for you is to provide your website with no link juice. While this is true, lots of junky or automated links will be sure to get you penalized.

Aaron Wall of SEO Book has many times said that a natural looking link-building profile works best to get you higher rankings. Why? Because if you go for an un-natural backlink profile, you will get penalized.

Normally you can get penalized in different ways. The worst which has happened to me personally is that one of my websites now shows up as result #900 for its keyword term. I must admit that I was not really careful while building lots of junky links to it without changing the anchor text, and this is what happened. But to be honest, I never thought about using that website long-term and was only experimenting on how I can achieve higher rankings really quick.

Also, I have many times seen my rankings decrease sharply, only to change the inbound link anchor text and see my rankings come back up in 2-3 weeks. This can only certify that Google hates automated, junky links which use roughly the same anchor texts.

Lessons from this post:

1. No matter who tells you otherwise, if you get the wrong links in the wrong way, it will get you penalized.

2. You should always vary your anchor text, but not to the point that it looks stupid.

3. Although you do not get penalized for building 100 links a day, if you build 10,000 links a day on a very new website, expect it to be trashed.

4. Stay under the Google radar when you are link building for a very new website.

5. Junky links pass no link juice, look very much automated and dramatically inflate your link popularity which causes you to appear on Google’s radar. Bad news.

Incoming search terms for the article:

Tagged as: automated links, bad quality links, google penalty, junky links

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