The best tactic however is not to gut a perfectly working SEO campaign without first knowing what is dangerous to the campaign, and what will continue to be seen as quality linking in the eyes of the search engine. Except when those guest posts come across as spam. This caused a tremor in both camps. For the white-hats, they struggled to make sure that their high quality links didn’t come across as low-quality SEO farm content. Sometimes they would pull entire link structures that were 100% ethical and well applied. The black-hats on the other hand, the ones who plagued countless websites with links to obscene and vulgar products found themselves in a unique position. Some who only mildly exploited the SEO link farms had a path they could clean up. The ones whose success was built on spam found themselves having to relocate content to a completely new site because their SEO campaign had gotten them disavowed.
Before we can learn what a bad link looks like— which there is many and different of them— we must first learn what good linking looks like. This new age of Penguin and Panda, and even more so the new Hummingbird algorithm that’s been implemented all love to see links that meet these traits: Are high quality. Whoever is in charge of posting the guest posts or comments needs to be a good writer. All content needs to be mostly original. The more it is replicated, the more it starts to appear like spam to a search engine crawl-bot. Content also needs to be relevant. Another big ticket by the Google cops comes from guest posting with links on high-ranking, but completely irrelevant sites. While the link’s anchor-text can get flagged for having a bad anchor, this is only made worse if the guest post is irrelevant, such as posting about how reliable an engine is on a pregnancy clothing site. Don’t overdo the linking, two at the most.
Peter Zmijewski is the founder and CEO at KeywordSpy. His expert knowledge on Internet Marketing practices and techniques has earned him the title “Internet Marketing Guru“ He is also an innovator, investor and entrepreneur widely recognized by the top players in the industry.
