Within this entry to the SEO Manual (Search Engine Optimisation) we will discuss what constitutes as bad linking. There are a number of areas that need to be covered as there are no 100% official definition of ‘bad links’.
What is a Bad Link?
A bad link can include a number of things such as; links from a website with a number of spammy links, links from a website that contains spam and black hat techniques and links from irrelevant websites. All of these factors can make a link ‘bad’ for your website.
How does it affect a website?
There are a number of ways that it affects websites. Firstly, search engines look at the links to and from a website; this is one of the main ways in which they gauge how popular and how relevant the website is. If there are many ‘bad links’ then the website could get penalised. There is a Google penalty of different positions within the SERP’s, which if was to happen to a website could take a very long time to recover from depending on the popularity of the keyword.
If the links are so bad that the penalty is not sufficient then the website may be banned and a re inclusion request will have to be sent to the search engines once all bad links have been rectified.
How do you avoid bad linking?
The first step to avoid bad linking is to be selective about the links you request and accept. If the links are related to your website and are of good quality then great; if they are not and you’re just accepting them just to have another link then that’s not so good. 10 good quality links are better than 20 bad quality links.
There are also other ways of getting links including sponsoring blog templates and website templates. You must be very careful when doing this as you may not necessarily know who’s going to be using your templates and for what purpose. A real-life example was a website that sponsored a template and that template was used a number of times for a spammy pornography website; the website got issued a major penalty as the links were irrelevant to the website.
Take care of your links and the links will take care of you.
Linking building is a vital part of the off page optimisation. Since bad link building has become more known, more and more questions are being asked about, ethical link building, unethical link building, quality link building and link baiting.
So what is the difference between Good link building and bad?
A Good Link:
You can’t always control how people link to your site,as generally you don’t find out till the link has been established. However, being prepared for this could open several doors for opportunity of gaining more links and over a period of time you could receive good ones in return. Other all, the most important part is that a search engine can read your links. The best link would be to receive a link from Google, but lets me honest, what chance is there of gaining this link. Therefore a very good link would be a link from a good website ( high achieving, page rank website), which is linking to a part of your website that you wish to achieve higher acknowledgment and page ranking within the search engine results pages (SERP).
A bad link:
All bad links are typically defined as span on a page. This is a SEO technique, known as unethical. You do not want to link to these links, as these are known as bad neighborhoods, which can affect the running of your site dramatically and can even get you completely removed within the search engines. You should want to gain links from trusted sites, as these can allow you to gain more acknowledgment and high rankings for your website. Also gaining links from trust worthy sites allows you to see that these sites have been indexed by the search engines such as Google. Search engines hate hidden links and spammy networks. Google are well known for removing sites from within the index, as they class these sites as part of a bad neighborhood. .
In conclusion, gaining good links to and from your website can take time and alot of experience for it to be done successfully. Therefore determining if your website is linked to a bad neighborhood is not a easy step to establish and if it is left before you know it your site could have been removed from within the search engines. I highly recommend that if you are unsure of think you are linked to a bad neighborhood you don’t leave it any longer and get you website optimized.
