Loading ...Few people are unaware of the huge importance of link building as part of your search engine optimisation efforts. The search engine algorithms look for links of high value and relevance and this count for your SERPs ranking. Where does that leave you when you receive emails that are in reality spam from webmasters that claim they have visited your website and want to link with yours?
They spin a nice story about how beneficial this would be for both of you. These emails then go on to tell you how wonderful your website is and how completely relevant your website is to theirs. After many flowery compliments they slap you with a list of pages that they want you to link to and get a link back in return. This is where an experienced website owner summarily trashes such an email and forgets about its existence.
Random links
Unfortunately some of the new and inexperienced website owners still fall for this and then does the linking. The problem with this type of linking is that it is a directory page that is completely filed with totally random links that they have gathered by trawling the internet with their spam emails. The chances are extremely high that the page is not indexed because normally there are no inbound links that point to that page. Thus the reciprocal link is utterly and completely useless to you.
Unnatural links
Most people will tell you bluntly that it is a form of link farming as the creation of that page has only one purpose; to boost rankings of sites artificially through those unnatural links. Sooner or later the search engines will slap that page with penalties. If you had linked, it means you are in line to face penalties as well. In reality what you have done by falling for this spam email soliciting links is to give them a valuable link.
In return you have received absolutely nothing of worth; there has been no fair trade. When there is no fair trade and links are built unnaturally and bring you no value, it becomes unethical. No online business or business website can afford it today to be grouped with any websites that practice any form of unethical link building.
Keep it natural
Too many inexperienced website owners that do not have full knowledge of all the factors of search engine optimisation go along, not realising that they could be damaging their ranking. Never respond to unsolicited emails asking for reciprocal links; keep your link building natural and clean.
Make very sure that when you exchange a link with another website that you are getting a valuable link from a page with high status and total relevance to your own website. Link building has become an art form to separate the bad neighbourhood links and worthless links from those that add value to your own website and help your ranking and not harm it. To keep your website clean you need to educate yourself on the good and the bad of linking.
Related posts:
- Shop for your links
- The lowdown on links
- Building links in three easy steps
- Are paid links bad?
- The lowdown on links
Tags: bad linking, linking techniques, reciprocal linking for seo
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