Search engine optimization has changed a lot in the past few years. Things that used to work great in the past do not work anymore. Other techniques that delivered great results in the past will get your website penalized today.
In our new article series, we’ll talk about outdated SEO techniques and why you should avoid them. We’ll also show you better alternatives.
Not recommended (and sometimes risky): outdated link building techniques
Links are the most important factor in Google’s ranking algorithms. That’s why so many people tried to manipulate the links that point to their websites in the past.
This used to work until Google found out how to detect manipulated links. Websites that used these links were penalized and they lost their rankings. Building links that way can still work for some keywords, but it is very risky. In addition, the results do not last.
In general, Google’s latest ranking algorithms simply ignore spam links. If your website has very many of these spam links, your website still can get a manual penalty. For that reason, you should avoid these outdated link building techniques:
- Blog comment spam.
- Forum spam and forum signature spam.
- Paid links that do not use the rel=nofollow tag (for example site-wide footer links).
- Private blog networks (a network of small websites that are just used for link building).
- Link directories that link to all kind of websites.
- Unrelated article directories and low quality guest-posts.
All of these methods seem easy. Unfortunately, all of them are risky and they can have a negative influence on your search engine rankings.
The better alternative
Link building is not difficult if you follow some basic rules:
- Links that are created automatically in bulk are bad.
- The easier it is to get a link, the less influence it has on the rankings of the linked page.
- Links that are good for human visitors are also good for search engines.
First of all, you should remove all unnatural links that point to your website. The Link Disinfection tool in SEOprofiler can help you to do that:
Just enter the URL of your website and the Link Disinfection tool will show you the links that you should remove. Contact the site owners and ask them to remove the link. If that is not possible, the Link Disinfection tool will create a ‘Disavow links’ file for you that you can send to Google.
After removing the bad links, you can start to build better links that point to your site. The link building tools in SEOprofiler will help you to do that. For example, SEOprofiler offers these tools:
- Link Profiler: analyze the backlinks of any website and get detailed statistics.
- Link Manager: keep track of your link building activities, check if a website still links to your site, evaluate potential link partners, contact other websites.
- Hub Finder: find websites that link to several of your competitors, these sites are likely to link to your site, too.
- Link Opportunity Finder: quickly find websites that are related to a particular topic and likely to link to your site.
- Starter backlinks: submit your website to authority sites in your category.
- Local hubs: make sure that your website is listed in all relevant local directories.
Get better rankings
There are many things that you can do to get better rankings on Google and other search engines. If you use up-to-date SEO methods that play by the rules, you will get results that last.
In addition to the link building tools, SEOprofiler offers many more tools that help you to get better rankings and more customers. If you haven’t done it yet, try SEOprofiler now:
