Sep 12
Q and A: Is this an effective link building approach?
Oooh you're back! Lookin good. Have you lost weight? Yes, that was a compliment designed to butter you up for my next question. Subscribed to my feed yet? :-)
Hi Kalena
My boss has received a proposal from a website development company that included link building.
They tell me it involves 5,500 websites in a partner database that will link to us; sites spread across a range of sources and types to ensure a “natural” link profile growth. 1500 of these are related to our specific industry. The company says websites that will link to us are “confidential” – ranking from blogs to directories and more. And they vary the anchor text across a spread of keyword phrases to emulate as close as possible a “natural” link profile.
Does this sound effective to you? Wondering what your thoughts on this approach are?
Susan
Dear Susan
Hmmm. That sounds very dodgy to me, particularly the “confidential” part. If a marketing company won’t actually reveal what sites are going to link to you, you should be suspicious because that means you lose control of how your site is being marketed.
If any automated link farms, blog commenting or dodgy link selling schemes are used (and this is what I suspect with the high volume quoted), it could potentially damage your site’s reputation in Google or earn a ranking suppression of some kind.
As Google states in their Webmaster Guidelines:
“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”
Read more info on what Google considers link schemes.
Susan, it’s probably not the answer you want to hear, but there really is no shortcut to link building. It should be done carefully and in my opinion, manually and the process should be completely transparent between client and supplier. That’s the way I build links for clients and I always let the client have the ultimate decision about a potential link source.
Link building the traditional way does take time and money but is well worth the investment. The resulting effect on a site’s PageRank and traffic can be substantial.
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September 12th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
totally agree … Link building the traditional way does take time and money but is well worth the investment.
has to be the most important part of seo
September 17th, 2008 at 10:32 am
Susan,
Nice advice from Kalena. I was lucky that I got a web developer that
informed me of the problem of “bad links”. They do the basic
SEO for the website and I do a lot of the link building. Every
link that we have has been individually solicited and we do not
buy any links since Google frowns on that practice. Kalena is
correct that it takes a lot of time and effort — try and do a
few links each day or week and they begin to add up. I only
trade links with related industries — although sometimes the
relationship may be obscure to say the least.
Good Luck Susan