Can Inbound Links Harm Your Website?
This article is guest posted by Angie.
This is a question that I get asked from clients from time to time and in most instances, the answer is NO.
Google and other search engines do not make it easy for competitors to damage your business. If inbound links could have a detrimental effect on your SEO than it would be in your competitors’ interest to ‘sabotage’ your site, thereby improving their own positions by knocking you out of the search engine result pages. That would be crazy! Search engines will not penalise you for something which you as a site owner have no control over.
According to Google: “There’s almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from our index.”
However, there are certain link-building techniques that can be seen as “unnatural” and result in the links being ignored or discounted. If you’ve got a link building campaign going on and are quality links coming to your site at the same time as you suddenly get 100s of links from a known link farm or websites associated with a “bad neighbourhood” you could run the risk of all links being discredited, even the quality link that would have otherwise benefited your site.
Too Many Links Too Quickly
If you suddenly get 100s of links to your website as soon as it goes live or in one go, they are likely to look unnatural and be discredited. For this reason, link building should be an on-going, gradual process that is carried out throughout the life of your website.
Link Farms
Link farms sell text links. As a norm, they are likely to be of little value. For the reasons discussed above, they are unlikely to have a detrimental effect on your site or search engine rankings, however, they are likely to have no effect and can risk detrimentally affecting other link building efforts that are being carried out at the same time.
Vary Your Anchor Text
In order to keep your back links looking as natural as possible it’s best to vary your anchor text. Therefore, if you’re targeting, “Whitening Toothpastes” for example, try using variations such as “Toothpastes for Whitening”, “Tooth Whitening” & “Lightening Toothpaste” in conjunction with your main target keyword.
Linking out from your website.
At this point it would be worth a quick mention that whilst links to your site are unlikely to have a detrimental effect, links from your site to others can. Avoid linking to web spammers or link farms on the web, your web ranking may be affected adversely by promoting those types of sites.
Guest Post by Angie Stewart, Online Marketing Consultant for Maginus. Maginus provide online marketing service, specialising in ecommerce marketing solutions.
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- Can Inbound Links Harm Your Website? | blogcopycat
August 8, 2011 7:21 AM
8 Comments Add yours
March 20, 2011
10:28 pm #comment-1
Link building can be time consuming but rewarding in the long run. Don’t try to make a short cut or else placing yourself on the banned side.
July 6, 2011
12:55 am #comment-2
Couldn’t agree more. Think of link building as building relationship or networking. It may take time and you would have to establish trust with those whom you wish to “link back” to you and it’s important to make them feel that you’re genuine with your efforts or you’ll be tagged as “just another marketer”.
May 19, 2011
1:05 am #comment-3
Great information! I never though about incoming links in this light, but it does make sense. I never purposely exchange links with sites that I consider of little value or “spam” sites, and I sure don’t link out to them.
Great site, lots of useful info – thanks.
May 19, 2011
9:30 am #comment-4
The change of Google algo affected fasted indexing of backlinks. We were used to getting backlinks from sites suggested by most seo experts (such as angelapaulbacklinks). And now that Google has become more stricter, we need to make double effort to get old backlinks indexed. It’s strenuous. People veer away from the old approaches and move on to ways such as email, article, & video marketing.
June 9, 2011
3:35 pm #comment-5
thanks for the info apology to how many links per day is recommended, and since the number of links Google might consider you as spam
July 2, 2011
1:17 pm #comment-6
Yes link building requires too much time and effort if you are going to do it by yourself. If you have the money to invest on linkbuilding, then just outsource the tasks to seo masters. It’s more productive because you will have more time to start other projects.
July 13, 2011
9:35 am #comment-7
Link building is a very important part of successful website. Do not take short cuts otherwise you will feel the pain in the end! Write quality content and get natural inbound links.
August 7, 2011
11:38 pm #comment-8
link building works but take alot of times