5 Reasons To Be Weary About Link Building Offers

You probably already know that, generally speaking, the more quality links there are back to your website, the better your Google rankings will be.

First, what do I mean by “quality”?

3 basic attributes of “quality” websites include:

1. Have content that is very useful to people
2. Well established in a well defined or uncontested niche with lots of web traffic
3. Reputable and official in some way like Government extensions like gov or govt (eg if you were an accountant, a link to your website from ird.govt.nz would be awesome)

If your website is good, you’ll probably get lots of links back to your site (“backlinks”) anyway, but it is tempting to accelerate the process.

I get email spam from overseas based firms offering link building services every day (my Gmail spam filter struggles to keep up).

They make big promises “#1 Google ranking guaranteed” and they use industry jargon (llike “whitehat” and “PageRank”) and specific promises to try to impress “20 links on PageRank 3 blogs + 20x PR4 + 10x PR5…”

You must be wondering:

• Can you trust them?
• Do you need them?
• Are their link building techniques legitimate?

No, no and no.

Here are 5 reasons why you should never engage in this type of SEO to your website:

1. As a rule, never support any offer delivered via SPAM. It just encourages more spam.
2. If they are spamming you, they are offering this deal to the whole planet therefore if they get thousands of customers the techniques they use lose effectiveness
3. Think ahead: Would thousands of links back to you on random blogs be useful to your potential customers? If not, Google will ignore them eventually if they don’t already
4. It could actually damage your Google rankings, if they use “black hat” techniques for you which Google has identifies as attempts to game the system
5. Google is trying very hard to deliver increasingly localised search results so a link to your website from a website in Cambodia about chickens is becoming more and more irrelevant

So what can you do?

Do it yourself:

1. Write useful articles on your website that people will want to link to and share
2. Write useful and value-adding comments to blog articles about your industry
3. Invest in content marketing instead (trust me it works).
4. Promote content and convince people to link to you, rather than invest in off shore SPAM.

Never hire anyone who doesn’t clearly explain what they are doing.

Don’t get me wrong, building links will help your search engine rankings if you conduct the process in the right way. The focus should be on content and value before placing a link to you website. Be weary of people who “build links”.