The Dark Side of Link Building

If you pursue link building and SEO education further on your own, you’ll quickly discover what I’d call the dark side of online marketing.

I’ll refrain from teaching you black-hat techniques and opt instead to list a series of borderline activities you may come across and be tempted to partake in. Don’t. They’re not worth your time.

• Buying high PageRank links: As mentioned multiple times, buying links will get you blacklisted or penalized by search engines.

• Renting email addresses: At best this is a waste of time; at worst you end up spamming people who don’t know you or your blog. It also violates privacy laws in many countries.

• Buying social media votes: You can artificially boost your popularity on social networks like Reddit by buying votes for $0.10--$1.00 USD each. In many cases, doing so will get your blog banned from or penalized on social networking sites.

• Three-way link exchanges: Reciprocal links between two sites don’t offer much in the way of SEO benefits, so there are services that take advantage of intermediary sites in the link chain to generate nonreciprocal links among those who participate in their network. Google is well aware of such schemes.

• Fake blogs: You can create a series of dummy blogs through free services like Blogger or WordPress.com, and then have all of them point back to your blog. Such services routinely ban fake blogs and accounts in an effort to keep down spam.

• Link wheels: This is a linking scheme involving fake blogs and article submissions that are organized to boost the authority of the URLs linking to your “money page” (the URL you want to promote), with the ultimate goal being to greatly boost the PageRank and relevancy of your money page for target keywords.

• Mass article submissions: Spun content is submitted not just to article directories but also to networks of low-quality blogs and is set up only to attract the content of other bloggers and to earn money via AdSense and other advertisements.

• Automated submission to a variety of directories: This is when you use software to automatically submit your site and feed to hundreds or thousands of crappy directories that no human will ever truly find useful.

You get the gist. While some black-hat SEOs do pretty well with these techniques, even when not technically illegal, they’re still trying to game the system and will eventually be caught. Focus on adding value to your readers and your online community. The rewards and efforts will be far greater, and you won’t risk being penalized by search engines and social media sites.