Bad Links That Can Invite Penalties From Google

SEO services around the world continue to use link building as one of the major techniques to boost the search rankings of websites. While legitimate link creation does truly help to improve your organic rankings, there are bad links that can actually harm your SEO efforts. What are these bad links? Well, to put it succinctly, these are certain types of links that can lead to Google penalizing your website. While one or two bad links might not cause your website to drop in rankings, a significant amount of these links can cause the Google algorithm to systematically pull you down the search results. In extreme cases such links can even invite manual action against your website, thus causing it to disappear from the results altogether. This makes it very important to recognize and avoid bad links while working on link building for any website. The following is a detailed discussion of the different bad links that can cause Google to penalize a website.

Links built using automated link building tools are considered to be bad links. While such tools can help websites generate a large number of links easily and in a short time, these links do more harm than good. The Google algorithm is advanced enough to detect such links and is sure to penalize websites that resort to these tactics.  

If your website has a very large number of external links that are of the nofollow variety, Google may consider this to be a black-hat link building practice and proceed to penalize your site. As multiple nofollow links are considered a signature of unnatural link building practices, be aware of using them while building your link profile.  

There was a time when submitting your website to web directories used to be a legitimate way of getting links. However, with most web directories becoming irrelevant with time, this is no longer the case. In fact, by listing and getting links from shady web directories with dubious credibility, your website stands a chance to get penalized by Google for such bad links. So the next time you are listing with a directory, consult with an experienced SEO agency in India to make sure it helps you.

This is one of the gravest link related sins that you can commit in Google’s eyes. Buying links to boost your search rankings is a direct violation of Google’s guidelines and will definitely invite penalties ranging from a drop in ranks to outright blacklisting. While it may seem to be a quick and effective way to build up an impressive link profile, this strategy will do you more harm than good in the long run.

Another type of bad link to avoid is links which have little to no relevance to the content of your site. Adding links randomly just for the sake of it will make a bad impression with Google. Even if your links are derived from high authority sources, unless they are related to your niche, they are considered bad links. So don’t get caught up in the hype of link building, and take the help of a reputed SEO agency in India to create a suitable link strategy for you.

Private Blog Networks (PBNs) were once a legitimate way to build a solid link profile. Now they are just considered unethical. If you are still using PBNs as part of your link building strategy then it is time to stop doing so. When Google detects this, and you can be sure it will, penalties will soon follow that will harm your ranking.

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