Inbound Marketing: Bad Link Building & Black Hat SEO
Posted by Justin Cambria
Many businesses today are ready to embrace the tenets of inbound marketing. They want to invest their marketing dollars online. But it's difficult for busy business owners and marketers to learn as much as those of us who work in this world about online marketing practices.
It’s true that link building, or getting good quality links to your site, accounts for 75% of your SEO score and is the foundation of off page SEO. But all links are not created equal. Here’s some of the terms of the trade and a few tips to ensure you are dealing with above-board web marketers. We want to save people from the evil SEO merchants out there! But how?
Black Hat SEO
Since the early days of blog comments, many unscrupulous SEO practitioners have written programs that crawl the web and write SPAM comments on blogs to point back to a site whose ranking they want to improve. This is common practice amongst online pornographers and illegal overseas MP3 sale sites. This practice is one form of black hat SEO, and is usually engaged in with the hope that a goal can be achieved over a short term as the spammers know that the search engines will ban them once their tactics are uncovered.
Spamdexing
I recently listened to a sales demo from a rep at a prominent web marketing firm who showed me a page indexing hundreds of thousands of links allegedly pointing to his site. I looked through some of them and they were trash links from meaningless sites – the horror! I’d come face to face with link SPAM!
SEO best practices encourage legitimate means, like posting great content, tweeting about it, and commenting on other trusted blogs to build links back to your site. Some SEO firms will Spamdex by building lots of buried or invisible pages on a client site because more indexes pages will mean more traffic. They can then demonstrate high numbers of site visits to clients, but that traffic will be meaningless and will never convert to leads.
The ‘NoFollow’ Attribute
It’s also important to be aware of the nofollow attribute. Many directory sites and prominent social networks (Yelp, Facebook, Google Local, etc) utilize this attribute because they don’t want link spammers creating fake directory listings on their sites to influence their SEO score. By using it, these sites ensure that no SEO credit is awarded to links on their site; in other words, google doesn't count a link to your site on Facebook in your SEO score.
Be wary of SEO firms who tell you that they are going to create lots and lots of links for you or submit your site to many directories. Though there can be value in being on these directories because many of them have independent traffic, they do not influence your SEO score.
What to Ask to Protect Yourself
It's competitive out there and is a sad reality that some black hat techniques can produce results over the short term, but any such techniques will be a losing strategy for a legitimate business over the long term. Ask firms you are considering doing business with to send you 3 examples of sites they have worked on and to put you in direct contact with their clients for referrals. Also, ask them:
- What practices do you use to build good off site links? I want to work with a vendor that understands honest link building through great content.
- Are you familiar with the no follow attribute and how it affects off site SEO score? I understand there are some great directories but I want to attract links that will be recognized by the search engines, too.
- What is your opinion on black hat SEO and Spamdexing? I'm in the web marketing gain for the long haul and any short term, dishonest SEO practices hold no appeal for me.
Have you had any encounters with bad SEO or web marketing firms? Please share in the comments!