If you are familiar with SEO than you may have heard the term backlinking and how it can benefit your marketing campaign gain some organic audience. What you need to know is that there are certain unnatural backlinking practices that are counted in Google’s list of black hat SEO practices and should be avoided if you do not wish for your website to be penalized by Google. Discussed below are some of the backlinking practices prohibited by Google.
1. Direct Advertising Articles
Allowing articles or blog posts on your website that reflect direct advertising with a follow backlink, you are in direct violation of Google’s guidelines. If you wish to pursue this practice, you need to make sure the content isn’t too direct or isn’t forcing the user to click the link. Discuss with your link building freelancer before posting anything you’re not sure of.
2. Link Exchange
It has been a common practice among bloggers to link to similar or source content in their posts. While this a white hat act, doing it on hundreds of platforms raises red flags on Google servers endangering your website and those you are redirecting to. However, if you still wish to fly under Google’s radar, learn about one-way link building techniques.
3. Blog Networks
As SEO started gaining momentum, we saw a rise in blogging networks. The sole purpose of these networks is to provide a platform for backlinking. With time, Google’s servers became wiser to this and Google added these types of backlinks to its violation policy. So, if your website has a backlink to any such networks or vice versa, well, you are swimming in dangerous territory. Nowadays, even link building freelancers don’t recommend it.
4. Guest Posting
While guest posting differs from blogging networks, many professionals have been observed abusing it by posting low quality content with just backlink to drive traffic. But as many would think, it isn’t quite easy to fool Google’s servers and such posts get flagged.
5. Hiding Links in Coding
Many developers have a habit of hiding backlinks in the CSS or JavaScript of websites to help improve its ranking in the search engines. But search engine crawlers have also evolved and are capable of detecting and flagging such websites.
6. Paid Links to Pass PageRank
Once widely practiced, many people have fallen victim to it. People purchase text or image links that redirects users to their websites. Google considers this an unnatural link to pass the PageRank. It is advised to use rel nofollow command for any such links on your website to avoid the violation.
7. Anchor Text
If you are using the same keywords to generate backlinks to your website, you may be penalized by Google regardless of the originating source of these backlinks. Google’s AI has become a lot smarter at detecting commonly occurring SEO patterns and flagging them.
Conclusion
While we have discussed some of the violations, you can get a more detailed guideline about backlinking from Google’s Webmaster tool. And yes, link building is an important part of every SEO strategy but it requires some caution to be practiced. Contact a link building freelancer for best results.