Link Building Strategies: Artificial Link Building

Artificial link building has always walked a fine line between black hat and white hat. This is not because these methods are wrong but because they are overused by certain people to the point where they look like spam. Organic link building is always preferable but it can also be slow and these artificial methods can give you a much-needed boost every now and then. Whether or not these methods are harmful will depend on how you use them. Misusing them can lead to penalties from Google so you have to use these methods carefully.

Submitting to directories

Web directories don’t matter as much as they once did before search engines took over. These are the online equivalent of the yellow pages and they list websites depending on the niche and topics. Before search engines, this was important as they could help people to find the sites that contained the information they wanted. However, the quality of these directories have gone down in recent years and the sites are full of people looking for link juice. Google will soon be looking at directories as link farms and thus submitting to these may work at the moment but it’s unlikely to do much for you in the long run.

Commenting on Blogs

Commenting on blogs can help you to gain links only if the blog owner allows ‘dofollow links’. Many blogs don’t allow ‘dofollow links’ because many people tend to utilise such opportunities to spam the comment section of such blogs for link building purposes. If you find such an opportunity, you can make better use of it by adding comments that add to the discussion and adding your link only where it’s relevant. Otherwise, your comment could quickly get flagged and deleted.

Posting on Forums

Posting on a good forum can give you considerable link juice but before you rush to post on one of the many forums out there, remember that behind every good forum is probably a good forum administrator who is always on the lookout for spam and will not hesitate to delete your content and possibly ban you from the forum.

You can make much better use of a forum by posting carefully thought out information that provides readers with something they want. This makes it easier to have all the right links in the post as well.

Buying Links

This isn’t a practice that Google is a big fan of but there is no way of the search engine finding out unless this information is revealed by either party. If you’re buying a link from an authority site, you could get a significant amount of link juice without putting in too much effort and you will also not be compelled to link back to the same site. However, buying a link from an authority site in any industry is not likely to come cheap. To ensure you get your money’s worth, focus on quality sites that are related to your niche.