If you are into internet marketing, how many times over the last couple of months did you come across an article or blog post stating that SEO is dead? It seems to me that topic is trending ever year, and the reality is that if you don’t understand the science of SEO, it’s easy to believe that it’s dead.
With all the updates Google has done to their algorithm over the past year, it’s very easy to dismiss old school search engine optimization methods as invalid, but when it comes to the heart and soul of SEO which is link building, that would definitely be a huge mistake. Links from authoritive sites online are still good and can add quite a lot of value to the pages you are linking to. Google is focusing more on quality content (old saying of content is king), and removing all the spam and irrelevant content from their index.
Bad link building
Even though link building can still add value to your SEO campaign, it doesn’t mean all links are good. Find below a couple of links that you should always avoid in your campaign.
- Paid links
- Focusing only on one main keyword anchor text
- Links from spammy neighborhoods
- Multiple links from the same web pages
- Splog (spam blog) links
- Links that focuses on redirects
- Javascript links
There are more links to avoid, but the ones above are the most common. Anything with SEO and digital marketing that are “too many” and “excessive” is never good. That simply means that if you overdo your link building campaign, you will most likely get penalized by the search engine gods.
How to get valuable links
Most of the search engines still analyzes all the inbound links to determine the value of those links. What makes a good link?
A valuable link is one that is derived organically (naturally) and that is relevant to a domain or website page topic. This doesn’t mean that you should build all your links with keywords in the anchor text. Non keyword links can also pass value, but at the end of the day you should focus on creating magnetic content that has the natural ability to attract readers, links, and engagement. Always stay away from bad neighborhoods, spammy campaigns, and bad websites for link building. You will do your campaign more harm than good in the long run.
