74.jpg)
Link Chain by andydr, on Flickr
This post relates a little to my post a couple of weeks ago ‘Is Spam Here to Stay?‘. Since then, The New York Times revealed that a leading American retailer, JC Penney was using paid, spam backlinks to inflate their rankings, & it was working for them. You can read more about it here: The Dirty Little Secrets of Search.
What’s a bit of a coincidence is that last week I was doing some research for a client, reviewing some competitors’ backlinks and they all had a similar theme – spam! I was researching the office furniture industry and I reviewed the backlinks of several sites. I was surprised at how many of them had very poor quality links from shoddy looking sites, some totally unrelated to their industry and some had obviously paid for links. What stood out was that the anchor text of some of these links included their main target keywords, in this case ‘office furniture’ or similar. The reason I was researching these sites was that they all ranked very well for the target keywords, which are also quite competitive. Most of these sites had thousands of links pointing to their site as well.
Gaining good quality links isn’t easy, although I pointed out a few easier ways of gaining links in my post last week, 5 Quick & Easy Link Building Tips. (Econsultancy also recently wrote an article on the same subject ‘51 essential link building tips‘). To get thousands of links like these sites had, the sites had to be using link farms or automated link building to get that many links on low quality sites.
This makes me ask two questions:
Why get links from such low quality sites?
Do they really care which sites links to them?
To answer the first question, the only reason they wanted these links was to inflate their link popularity and boost rankings. A large part of the way search engines rank sites is incoming links or ‘link popularity’ (however, usually it’s quality over quantity), so doing this would help them to rank highly for their search terms, particularly if the anchor text of the link contained their target keyword. Links on these sites certainly wouldn’t drive any traffic as it’s highly unlikely anyone would ever visit them, and if they did, they certainly wouldn’t stay on these sites for long. So these links certainly weren’t for the traffic!
And do they care where their links come from? Obviously not! Brand reputation wasn’t even considered when these links were obtained. I have many fussy clients who wouldn’t want their sites anywhere near the low quality sites these links were on. However, in fairness, some brands probably have no clue about the link building tactics their ‘seo’ company may be using. I’ll save that for another post.
It seems that for a lot of websites, rankings have been more important than the tactics used to gain them or their brand reputation, clearly demonstrated by the fact they didn’t care what type of site their website was appearing on.
Hopefully Google’s new clamp down on spam will demonstrate that using these tactics isn’t going to get you very far, and can damage your reputation in the long run!
Have you ever been tempted to list your website somewhere for the sake of a link rather than the quality of the website?
About Samantha McArthur
Sam McArthur is an internet marketing consultant with 12 years in the industry. She helps professional service businesses with their internet marketing strategy, helping them to see significant results from their online marketing activities, particularly within the search engines. She also consults on the latest internet tools, technology and best practice techniques.
This is an interesting conundrum as there will be little impact on brand reputation if a) nobody follows the link and b) your intended target audience is unaware of where you have links from – indeed, would they care anyway?
Quality over quantity is likely to be true, but where does a typical small business go when it has exhausted the main directories, e-article sites and sites of clients willing to provide testimonials?
Hi Neil, link building must the bain of most online marketers lives, it’s getting increasingly difficult to get good quality links! You’re right in saying that most audiences would have no idea where a particular site’s links came from, nor would they care anyway, however, for the brand itself, a link from a bad linking neighbourhood could affect rankings for them, nor show them in the best light if they are found to be ‘link farming’, so it’s important businesses are aware of this even if their target market doesn’t care.
It’s worth considering sharing links across social media sites as social shares can help spread the word, and may encourage people to include them in links from their own sites or blogs if they deem the content to be worth sharing (therefore producing content that will appeal to the target market can help a lot). A couple of resources here may help: http://econsultancy.com/uk/blog/7131-51-essential-link-building-tips and http://www.seobook.com/archives/001792.shtml.
Hope this helps!