Knowing when to stop link building

Knowing when to stop link building

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Due to the amount of questions we get from people who email or phone us about Google Penalties and problems with poor or spammy link building from their current SEO company we thought we’d put a blog together which will hopefully answer all these questions.

So first up if your SEO isn’t working and your rankings aren’t improving when do you say STOP!

  1. If your SEO isn’t providing you with details and data of the work they are supposed to be carrying out then it’s time to ask the question what are you actually doing for me?
  2. Rankings doing down not up
  3. Strange looking back links. This means from non-contextual sites, poor quality content, keyword rich anchor text overuse or abuse.
  4. Too long with no real results. SEO doesn’t guarantee results in fact the biggest variable is the site and the people working on it. But if after 6-12 months you’re not really seeing results then we suggest speaking to your SEO expert and finding out what’s going on and when you can expect to see some movement in the right direction.
  5. ROI ‘It just ain’t happening’ – If you’re spending more than you are making as a business and you’ve been plowing hundreds if not thousands of pounds per month for a considerable amount of time and you’re not seeing signs of a return on investment then it may be time to evaluate your campaign. Like I said before SEO isn’t an easy win overnight success it takes time and skill to achieve organic results. But 1-2 years and no movement or nothing to shout about then you should be talking to the people responsible and finding out why.

Adding the wrong kind of back links

Let’s talk about back links and how they should be used in your SEO campaign and the types of links you should try and avoid adding.

Web 2.0 Back Link Building

Some believe web 2.0 links should be used to promote and build brand link references where as we suggest you just avoid them altogether. It’s better to play it safe than risking your site to a penalty for too many low quality or building links to just improve rankings from a single source or link type.

Don’t build links on Web 2.0 with keyword rich anchor text you’re just asking for trouble with manual site penalties from Google.

Forum Profile Link Building

At one point forum profile links used to be a main source for SEO’s to acquire back links from high quality and trusted domains.

Then Google mass penalised many websites for overusing this method and pushing anchor text overuse as well. There are still some great sites such as www.ideastap.com where you can create a profile link, sometimes you even get a DO FOLLOW link which is great right? BUT! Don’t use anything than your Brand or Naked URL or Name.

Our advice is just avoid using forum profile links as your source of link building.

SAPE Link Networks

Oh dear where to start with this one. SAPE if you are not familiar with this terminology is simply a load of robot built websites on a huge list of domains. Usually have spun poor quality content and are owned by a single individual. Originating from sape.ru a Russian network where you pay for a link on site for very little. It is easy to acquire thousands and thousands of back links very quickly for not a lot of money. I recently saw a company in the UK bragging that their SEO had acquired rankings using SAPE links and when I checked in Ahrefs.com you can see the amount of link abuse going on. I think this kind of link building should just be instantly penalised by any site knowing to build SAPE links to manipulate organic rankings.

This obviously isn’t a complete list of types of link building techniques used but they are some of the worse in our opinion.

For more information contact SEO21 today!

Tom Peary is the director of SEO21 Ltd. Offering SEO, Website Design, Digital Marketing, Google Places Optimisation, Guest Blogging, Copywriting and Link Building Services.

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