What is a Bad Link?

Among the many and varied tactics and methods you can use to improve and add back links to your website, there are a few that are extremely dangerous and which can kill your entire site. Practices that might actually hurt your rankings with the major search engines are generally referred to as ‘black hat’, and should be avoided despite their propensity to achieve quick results – the results not only fade just as quickly, but can get your site de-listed, ruining all your hard work.

So what exactly are  ‘bad’ links; where do they come from, why are theyconsidered ‘bad’ and how they can negatively impact your site?

Many web entrepreneurs think that quantity is the key, and start contacting all their friends, family members and co-workers asking for links as well as any other websites in the same field. This may bring in some links, but most of these folks are going to expect you to return the favor. This means linking back to them from your own site, which devalues the link that they gave you.  Search engines are fully aware of ‘friends’ networks, and will sharply discount the value of these ‘reciprocal links’ when assigning value to your site.

In addition, the quality of these sites might not be up the best. This can reflect on you as well. If people assume that your site is probably only as good as the sites that link to you, then being associated with a low ranking page is not a god thing!

A very bad, very black hat option you may be tempted to try in order to obtain links for your site. This is listing yourself in an automated link management system. These sites say they will get you plenty of links, but basically consist of pages of web addresses all hyperlinked to each other.

Many of the sites will not even have any relevance to your field, and the whole setup is viewed by search engines with distrust. The engines will at best simply discount these as they really are just more reciprocal links, or at worst will label you a ‘link spammer’ and penalize you.

Taking the same view in the other direction, too many outbound links from your website to a friend’s may not be a good idea if the other site is completely unrelated to yours. You should have another site or blog for reciprocal or ‘buddy’ linking,  keep your website business oriented to relevant links for the best results.

Paid links are very dangerous.  There are a lot of black-hatters out there that promise to increase your links and page rank, or even guarantee a top ten spot in search results. In many cases, these are scams –  they either don’t deliver or they could use banned practices that will bounce back on you. Also, scammers may offer to pay you to write reviews or testimonials for their products; never endorse the product before researching it!

Hiring a reputable ‘white hat’ SEO to oversee your linking practices is a great idea if you are feeling worried about your site’s links. They should tell you exactly what they plan to do, and how they plan to do it. If the answers shady, try another SEO! You only want to use the right linking tactics to build trust in your site and your product.

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