Creating and promoting great content is the main path to gaining links to your site. This quality initiative will help you improve search rankings and build your site traffic. Here's a look at the somewhat dishonest and very transparent link-building methods that can hurt you:
- Tiny blog posts: Some days, you may have only one crucial sentence to tell everyone. But, as a rule, go for deep and valuable content. Google knows the difference. The search engines will not put you at the top of search results if you have a site filled with 200-word blog posts that only exist to place a keyword and aren't useful or helpful to the reader. The same goes for creating a separate one-page website just to link back.
- Self-serving comments: Don't comment, including a link to your website. You’ll annoy forum users and the webmaster. You can be reported to Google for spammy comments. Sometimes Google puts out a blog post asking for reports about comment spammers. Spam can also be reported to the FTC’s OnGuard Online. These types of comments just aren't worth it.
- Link exchange If you link to another blog because they’re a partner or pal and they return the favor, that’s fine. But it won’t get you any better rankings unless the other site(s) is very influential, has high traffic, and has high authority.
- Directory listings: Don’t submit your business to a mass directory or listing services. They provide irrelevant links that make you look bad. Syndicating articles for links leaves you with a lot of duplicate content online—another search engine no-no.
Do practice honest link-building. Create eminently sharable content that people love. Get Google+ shares, claim authorship of your content, repost relevant viral posts from Facebook or other social media, and stay tuned to this blog for more.
For more information, contact Colosi Marketing.
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