3 Link Building Strategies That Cause More Harm Than Good

Those days of easy link building are long gone, but there are still a few people out there who refuse to let go of these old, outdated link building habits. Today, these older link building practices are causing more harm than good. Here are a few bad link building examples that must be stopped.

Irrelevant Directory Submissions

Directories started showing up everywhere a few years ago. Suddenly there were millions of them and they were easy places to get a nice backlink. These directory links are now hurting sites, unless of course they happen to be relevant.

For instance, if you happen to own and operate a California SEO business then it would make sense to have your business listed in a local California directory. Local customers will find your business when they search through local directories.

Keyword Stuffed Anchor Text

This was a big issue that got a lot of websites in trouble with search engines. In the beginning, search engines weren’t exactly smart. They needed little hints, and stuffing an anchor text with an exact keyword or phrase was the single best way to do this. This has now become the easiest way to destroy a site’s ranking thanks to the over optimization penalty Google created that goes by the codename Penguin. Today it is much better to shoot for a branded link or even a link that uses a direct URL.

High PageRank Links

Google created a method to easily identify the importance of a website. This method was called PageRank and it was very easy to understand. A website was given a rank based on a 1 to 10 scale with the number 1 being the least important and the number 10 being the best website on the planet.

Grabbing links from sites with a high PageRank became the target of many link building strategies. This single measurement is no longer considered all that important. Instead, it is better to focus on the overall reputation of a site.

Don’t Fear Link Building

Google has done a fine job of shaking up the SEO world and causing fear in the minds of SEO experts. Link building is no longer an overnight process where millions of links help boost your site to instant success. Slow and steady wins this race. A link building strategy that focuses on long term goals is always the best.

At Crest Media, our experts know how to setup and prepare the best link building strategies for your brand. Contact us today and let us build a successful back link strategy for you.