5 Link Building Strategies to Avoid

Do a search on link building and you’ll find hundreds of sites claiming they have the best link building strategy that can get you a bizillion links in 24 hrs and have you ranking for anything you want.  Their all scams.  There are plenty of good, natural ways to build links, but here are 5 link building strategies to avoid:

1. Buying links:
   Google has specifically said that they will devalue paid links and, if they think you are intensionally trying to influence the search rankings with paid links, they may penalize you.  Don’t believe me, ask the folks at JC Penney.   Beyond the risk involved, it’s just a waste of money.  There are plenty of “free” ways to get links, links that won’t be taken down if you stop paying people 😉
2. Reciprocal linking campaign:
   Reciprocal linking is when you offer to link to a site in exchange for their linking to your site.  This worked for a while several years ago, but Google caught on and has greatly devalued reciprocal links.  It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do reciprocal linking, especially if the link makes sense for non-SEO reasons, but reciprocal linking shouldn’t be the focus of your link building strategy.
3. Link farms:
   There are too many definitions of link farms to list here because people keep trying to reinvent the link farm to out smart Google.  They generally don’t work and even if they do, they are soon busted. Google has a good list of definitions here. Link farms are bad news.  Stay away from them.
4. Linking wheels:
   A linking wheel is when you write a series of articles or write one article and spin it (re-write it over and over with different words) and then post the articles on various user generated content sites like eZines, Squidoo, blogspot, etc.  You then link the articles to each other and all the articles link to your main site.  This can take a decent amount of work and you only get a limited number of links.  Plus Google is on to this scheme as well and often devalues the links.  You’re better off spending that time writing some really good articles for your own site and letting people naturally link back to your site.
5. Blog comments:
   There is some debate as to whether Google and Bing count blog comment links, but even if they do, this is another strategy which takes a decent bit of time and may eventually be devalued anyway.  Remember, links cannot have the nofollow tag if they are going to pass authority (there’s debate about that too, but lets just go with it here).  Most blogs use the nofollow tags in comments by default.  So, you’d have to weed out the nofollow blogs and then you usually have to post quality, relevant comments to keep the blogger from deleting your comment.  Finally, a link from most blog post pages wouldn’t have much value anyway.  It’s just not worth your time.

Now that we’ve looked at some good link building strategies and some bad ones, here are 5 other things you need to know about link building.

Photos by ivanpw and Atelier Teee

What are some other link building strategies that you think are bad or just not worth it?