O ver the last several years website owners, SEO experts and SEM experts and even the inexperienced members of these groups have all spent a great deal of time and money in obtaining as many in-bound links to their website as possible because everyone had been told and learnt that the more websites linking to your website meant that it was more important, which gave your website the false impression that it was so amazing that everyone was linking to it so it must be important.
It worked, and it worked for years, the more in-coming or in-bound links to your website the better off your traffic was going to be, it was a simple equation. Website owners were doing whatever they could to get thousands of links from where-ever they could regardless of the website that was going to publish them.
Now, it’s all completely changed and changed because Google has realized that too many website manipulations were happening.
Google has gone as far as to ‘almost’ declare that links on web directories are now toxic, this is a very scary thought for all website owners who have partaken in any form of link building and has companies scrambling to try and remove any link from any website that is of no value or on a poorly created website.
A few of years ago, I started a web directory website as an experiment into how the link building was getting done and by whom. With all the recent changes one would expect that this website would die, however on the contrary it is going quite well with a continuous stream of new directory listings and all of them are trash and worthless and more likely to cause damage to the company doing the listing rather than good.
There are companies in the USA, England and Australia to name some of the biggest, still wasting money on link building campaigns done by company’s in country’s that provide so called inexpensive campaigns. What amazes me is either company’s do not know what they are doing or the company they have contracted is not telling them.
I’m starting to get more requests for removal of links from companies who are now realizing they were duped, when I remove a company’s entry on the web directory I always ask them how it got there and who did it, giving a great insight into past and current practices.
Now we are well into 2013 and the following things should now be a major priority of stopping and reviewing with a company who knows what they are doing. If you have a link building campaign going – review it! If you have a company contracted to do your SEO and SEM ask them exactly what they are doing as the following list is now a major…
DO NOT DO LIST!
- Web directory submissions – there is a handful of web directory’s that I consider still acceptable, but almost all should be avoided at all costs.
- Blog commenting – this should have stopped long ago, but it continues with millions of bot automated trash sent to blog sites every day.
- Tag stuffing on content pages, meta descriptions and title tags – best advice use common sense in writing these and don’t put your website name or url in titles.
- Resource Pages – these usually consist of a page of links to websites you think are important to you or company’s you deal with, basically it’s a trash page of links, you need to have content, limit the number of links and write about the company you are linking to and why your endorse their company and or products.
Lastly is, how is Google going to manage trashing campaigns, where a company does a link building campaign building useless and damage causing linking to a competitor website, this is a very dangerous and viable thing to do, there’s nothing stopping this kind of action and the internet is a competitive place with everyone out to make a buck or two.
In my opinion Google is going to have to change their tactic and disregard any low value links rather than punishing the website. Google does have a disavowing system but there are hazards to using it.
The best thing any company should be doing right now is reviewing their SEO practices and pruning any in-bound links that are of no value or from low quality websites in order to protect themselves from any possible changes coming.
