A word of caution about link building

[Michael Martinez]

I don't normally sound the alarm klaxons any more. Word usually gets around the Web pretty quickly when Google makes announcements but I haven't seen any buzz about this even in SEO forums (which kind of surprises me).

Google recently began warning people to start cleaning up any links they may have dropped in forums and blogs. "Link dropping" is the practice of signing up for a forum or blog so that you can leave a quick comment and include a link back to your site (or sites).

I don't see people discussing this technique here at PAL but there are ways to drop links and ways to drop links that are bound to get you into trouble. I believe that Google is more concerned with the latter.

Generally speaking, most blogs will now (by default) allow you to insert a link that uses your comment name as anchor text. The links are generally given a "rel='nofollow'" attribute, thus ensuring that major search engines won't allow them to pass internal PageRank or anchor text.

Most forums will also allow you to create a signature in your profile where you may embed a link that points to your site (often with helpful anchor text). SEO-savvy forum operators often disable signature visibility for visitors (meaning, you have to log in to see people's signatures).

It's considered rude and amateurish to resort to link dropping for link building purposes but a lot of people -- lacking resources, knowledge of alternative methods, and the means to hire reputable link building specialists -- drop links because they don't know what else to do.

So now Google is saying that if you build links this way, your site may be penalized (as well as the site that allowed you to drop a value-passing link). In other words, if you go around collecting lists of so-called "dofollow" blogs and forums so you can leave comments with links on those sites, your behavior may get your site penalized -- AND the blogs and forums that allow such links will also be penalized, so those links will stop passing value to your sites.

If you're exchanging links with other sites (and this is a perfectly acceptable practice as long as it's not the only way you obtain links), having a penalized site is not a good thing. Most people won't exchange links with penalized sites. After all, "who you link to says a lot about you" is a rule of thumb the search engines often discuss at SEO conferences.

Sites under penalty, especially penalized sites that obtain links from other penalized sites (and/or that link to other penalized sites), are considered to be "bad neighborhoods". You hear about "bad neighborhoods" all the time. People tell you not to link to them or obtain links from them. But no one ever describes bad neighborhoods.

Well, penalized sites are "bad" neighborhoods.

Google ups the ante in its link war every 1-2 years. This new strategy -- of penalizing sites that support link dropping as well as the sites benefitting from link dropping -- has yet to cause much grief in the Web marketing community. My feeling is that we'll start to see people complaining about lost rankings and search visibility in the new year.

Google often provides some sort of grace period for people to clean up their bad links before enforcing a new policy. I would not wait to clean up my backlink profile if it relied extensively on link dropping. I would not advise any client to wait if they were doing that. Now is the time to take action if you have been doing this.

It's becoming more and more challenging to obtain value-passing links, I understand that. I think link building has to become more content-oriented. You have to think about creating content that is appealing to other Web sites and you have to think about contributing useful, helpful content to other Web sites as well.

[Haynesey]

Thanks for sharing this Michael.

I know a lot of people on PAL don't use these techniques as a major part of their link building campaigns.

What are your thoughts on using a keyword as part of your name when making genuinely thoughtful comments on do-follow blogs? How do you think this will be "policed"?

Also It would be incredibly easy to hire people to do this maulicously to potentially penalise other peoples sites.

P.S hopefully this means Celeb Poker get a big fat penalty :P

[MJ]

Also It would be incredibly easy to hire people to do this maulicously to potentially penalise other peoples sites.

Key point here, curious myself.

[Michael Martinez]

A few people have expressed concern over how Google's new policy could be misused. You can read Google's position (and some responses to it) here. I don't know how to prevent someone from harming a site through the placement of malicious links, except to build a robust link profile that may withstand the effect of a surge in bad links.

People will probably challenge Google on this policy.

Haynesey, as a blogger I have occasionally approved comments where people used keywords as their names but they were usually brand keywords. Such links won't pass value, usually, and I would prefer that people know who I am, rather than think of me as a Website.

Your mileage may vary.

[Graham]

I run a forum and see these kinds of things all the time. Even a lot of the rooms seem to hire people to do this. Fortunately I have never been bothered with it as it seemed like they were pretty crappy links to begin with.

[LadyHoldem]

I get new sign-ups everyday profile link spamming and a few link spam posts. My forum doesn't pass juice though :P I wish somebodied tell the darn spammers :P

[Guerreiro]

But link dropping on .edu domains is still ok? Even though they do have nofollow tags, they still pass trust right?

[LadyHoldem]

I'm still not entirely clear about forums and blog commenting though. Here in my sig for instance, i linked to my site with anchor text. That's link dropping?

I've also done the same thing on a few other sites i belong to, but i've used my anchor in a paragraph.

Also, dp for instance has a tool that rss feeds in every blog post in every post i make... is that link dropping?

I'm sure my link's in the profile of every forum I've ever joined (keeping in mind that I used to post in pplz forums as a service.) and I comment in lots of blogs, and usually do leave a link, sometimes with an anchor, sometimes with my first name, sometimes with ladyholdem.. etc.

That's the scariest part. I can search for my u/n or something and get rid of most links in profiles like this one if need be. But .. i can't really control comments i left in blogs over the course of several years :O.

Will forums be targeted btw? Or just signature lines and profiles? Profiles are about the most common form of natural link for a news site.

[Unknown Webmaster]

Should I be worried if my site is getting a lot of links from forum posts compared to the amount of links I'm getting from websites?

The distribution is probably around 80/20 in favor of forums.

There are no way I can prevent getting the forum links, since they are being made by random poker players...

[leporello]

I dont think it's realistic. I could hire somebody to spam my competitors daily for a month. Quite a cheap way to get to the top of the SERPS. Don't think it's really feasible.