Online Marketing/SEO

Unnatural linking warnings via the Google Webmaster Tools are quite common now. A lot of SEOs and webmasters have been receiving such notifications through their GWT accounts. However, analyzing a site’s backlinks profile is not a cakewalk, particularly when you have tons of them. In any case, bad links (whether internal or external) can do serious harm to your website’s or blog’s search rankings. That’s why it’s vital to put things in order before you get the much-feared Google slap.

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Whether externally or internally, there are some specific types of backlinks that you should avoid at all cost. Given below are eight of such links that can quickly impact the rankings of your site negatively in search engines like Google.

1. Irrelevant Links
Whether it’s about linking out or getting linked, links have got to be relevant. After Google rolled out its Penguin update, link relevance has become an issue you can’t ignore anymore. Links that fall outside of your own niche are considered to be irrelevant by Google because they are not of any help to the user.

What benefit does a blog that caters to the SEO industry intend to bring to its target audience by linking to or getting linked by an “obscure sport bike lights site,” for example? Trying to build backlinks from sites with a high page rank that don’t fall under your niche, therefore, is an unethical SEO practice.

Whether you link to someone or somebody links to your site, link relevance must never be ignored. Period.

2. Paid Links
Buying links to blast your way to the top of Google search engine results is a serious SEO crime. John Mueller, a popular Googler, made it quite clear that if you have been buying links for the last three years, you should go back three years and get those paid links removed. John further advised not to wait out search rank penalties, as it can take months or years to recover.

3. Link Farm Links (more…)