Effective link building is a complex affair and can be an extremely time consuming and laborious task. However quality links are extremely powerful and a constant flow of incoming links is essential for any website hoping to compete in the search engine marketplace. When building links you should always be careful not to represent unnatural link behaviour. Failure to do so may see you link building efforts wasted.
So how do you avoid being flagged as a site that participates in unnatural linking behaviour? Here are a few key pointers you should keep at the forefront of your mind when building links:
Deep Linking
Google will give more weight to a site hidden wiki with 500 links all pointing to different pages on a site than it will a site with 750 links all pointing to the homepage.
Link exchange programs can be used to acquire high volumes of links in an effort to boost rankings. The traits of a website that participates in such a program are a high percentage of inbound links all pointing to the same destination URL.
Just like any other tactic that becomes popular it often finds itself being abused by unethical SEO’s. And just like with previous tactics,
such as stuffing the meta keywords tag, the major search engines adjust their algorithms to filter out websites that employ these tactics from their results.
Even if you don’t participate in such a program, you should be mindful that your inbound links don’t all point to the homepage if you want to avoid triggering such filters.Another point to consider is that, with natural links, a website has little control over where an external site links to. Natural links will often link to a page deep in the websites structure.