Quality over Quantity – Why Mass Link Building can be detrimental to your website.
We all know that one of the key elements of SEO is link building. It may not be everyone`s favourite past time as it can be very time consuming and sometimes ineffectual, but if it is done properly it works and can make a big difference to the search engine rankings. With this in mind it is easy to understand why some companies choose mass link building from directory sites that offer to spread your submission far and wide across sometimes hundreds of directories for a flat fee. Why do people choose this method over natural link building? Because it is easier and advertised as faster to get your link out there without spending man-hours on what can sometimes be a tedious task. These same companies think it is a quick fix to hand their link building task over to an automated service so they can concentrate on more “important” elements of SEO. As the educated amongst you will already know, link building is one of, if not the most important part of SEO and therefore should be given a little more attention.
What everyone needs to know about mass link building sites is that the convenience comes at a price and I`m not talking about the flat fee you pay before it starts. There are several negative effects that can occur due to your site being submitted in bulk to directories and these are because of association.
• Firstly, mass link building sites do not carefully pick out industry relevant sites for your link to go onto and can sometimes mean your link ends up on either general directories (usually with no page rank) or onto sites that have absolutely nothing in common with your website and therefore the core users of that site are unlikely to click through to your site giving you no benefit.
• Due to the technique of issuing links out to any directory it can find, this unfortunately means there is no guarantee on the quality of the sites your link ends up on. Google has become better at detecting links and their level of quality which means that you may be judged on the quality of your site by association with these links. This is not ideal especially if you don`t even know where your links have been sent to.
• As mentioned earlier, the quality of these sites can have an effect on your positioning when Google looks at the links attached to your site and a lot of sites used by mass link builders are associated with spam which Google could judge you on, therefore risking a penalty being imposed.
• Penalties can be given to sites that have mass linked and you could lose your place in the index for months at a time if Google deems your site to be associated with spam sites or poorly linked sites of dubious or low quality.
For SEO companies there is also the potential issue of resolving these problems after a site has been penalised because the site has previously used mass link building and it can be a slower process to get them back on their feet before starting the campaign again with natural techniques. If a penalty is still in place when an SEO company begins working for you then obviously this will hinder any further progress.
The real lesson to learn and that must be re-iterated is that short term fixes can have long term negative impacts and although the idea of mass link building may appeal to some customers, there is no substitute for good quality links from high quality sources.
October 30th, 2010
Hi Guys,
Interesting article but I don’t really understand how link building can be a punishable crime. Surely if this was the case then you could sabotage a competitors website. Am I wrong?
Thanks,
Phil
November 1st, 2010
Hi Phil
Due to the nature of the links used in mass link building techniques this can result in penalties imposed by Google. The importance of quality links must not be underestimated and to answer your question, in theory anyone can build a link to a website using any link but we hope in these already troublesome times that noone would be bored enough, or certainly hateful enough to spend valuable time building links from dubious websites with the aim of destroying another competitor. Is it possible? yes, but let`s hope SEO terrorism doesn`t become a regular issue.