So, you’ve just started a new business, and you want your business to show up in the search results in Google.

One of the ways to do this is to get links back from other relevant websites. These are seen by google as votes that your website is of good quality and relevant. However, it is possible to harm your site’s rankings by building too many artificial links. 

What is Artificial Link Building?

Artificial link building means faking your popularity on the web. It involves deliberately seeking to place links to your website on other peoples’ websites. The result is that your site will appear to have many “votes” from other websites, even though most of them are not genuine votes but pretend votes created by you to make your own site look better in the eyes of Google. The problem is, over the years, Google has become wise to these practices, and using such techniques can actually harm your site. 

Here are some artificial link building techniques you should avoid.

Link Farms

Link farms are collections of websites that all link to each other. The idea is that they all share link popularity amongst each other, and therefore all benefit from an increase in search engine rankings. The problem is that link farms don’t work anymore, because Google can spot them a mile off. It can easily see that every site links to every other site, and it will see it as an artificial linking structure, since natural site linking doesn’t happen like that. 

Buying Links

Some website owners resort to buying links, which can be done in several different ways. One way is to actually pay other website owners to place a link on their site. Another method of buying links is to pay somebody to go and get many free links to your site. Either way, they are still artificial links, and you run the risk of Google spotting that the links are not natural.

Content Networks

Content Networks, also known as Blog Networks, are collections of high PageRank blogs where you can submit articles, thereby getting good quality backlinks to your website. Examples include Build My Rank, Linkvana and Article Ranks. The problem is, Google has recently started to see these content networks for what they are, and some have even been completely de-indexed by Google, which is what happened to Build My Rank. Suddenly all those high quality links were gone. 

Good SEO Techniques

Thankfully, Google is not opposed to SEO optimisation as such; it just just wants to see it done naturally and fairly. Here are the main SEO optimisation techniques Google wants to see:

  • High quality content.
  • Relevant titles and meta data.
  • High quality natural links from real people who actually like your site. This includes your site being mentioned on social sites such as Facebook and Twitter by real peoples’ accounts. 
  • A good user experience (visitors should stay on your website for some time, rather than quickly clicking away).