Link Building Misconceptions

LINK BUILDING MISCONCEPTION 1:

"Adding Too Many Links to a Website Too Quickly Will Get That Website Penalized or Banned..."

This is the one of the most common misconceptions that I come across and it has been generated entirely by the blind leading the blind (or perhaps a better way to put it would be the misinformed leading the uninformed - thus creating a viscous self propagating cycle spread via SEO and marketing related discussion forums).

The worst part about this myth is that webmasters who get stuck in this frame of mind are ultimately restricting the results they want to see - to an extent that results don't appear to happen at all and they then simply give up.

If you only add a few incoming links to your website over a long period of time then your results are going to take a VERY long time to become reflected in the search engines. In fact, it's likely you won't see any real results because your "in the know"competitors are out there, out linking you, every day.

The most logical way to highlight this is to use the "media exposure" example.

Picture a website; let's say in the SEO training niche.

That website is already sitting in the top 5 in Google for the term "SEO training" under its own authority (theme relevancy, existing incoming links etc).

Suddenly there is a massive news campaign about its "amazingly new, unique and successful SEO training techniques".

Thousands of media outlets, news agents, bloggers, and other websites syndicating the story end up linking to the website in question over the space of a 48 hour period (to provide a reference for their stories).

Does that website suddenly drop out of Google because there are now 5,000 additional links pointing to the website in just a day or two?

No.

Just because a lot of new incoming links have been added to the domain it does not make it "less relevant" for the term in question in the eyes of Google.It is still holding it's ranking for the term in question under its own "authority" (which would inevitably strengthen as a result of such a scenario happening).

If Google were to remove this "now very popular" website from their index they would be doing a major disservice to their user base because no doubt a lot of people would be looking for it.

Examples of this happening occur on a daily basis, in every conceivable market, in every niche industry, for thousands of websites. Just follow the news.

So where does this misconception come from?

The Search Engine Propaganda Machine - It's in the best interest of the search engines to have webmasters believe this. If webmasters knew that it was as easy as getting as many incoming links as possible to a website in order to obtain good search engine rankings (and it is with a few other factors taken into consideration), then everyone would be doing it and manipulating the search engine rankings for their own end goal.

That wouldn't be much of a problem for those webmasters who serve up top quality content to back up their rankings and relevancy - but unfortunately that's not always the case. There are always webmasters out there (always have been and always will be) that go for the quick buck at the detriment of providing the best quality information for their visitors.

Such is life.

Having said all of that, and this is very important, there is an exception to this myth.

Here it is...

"Adding too many incoming links to A VERY NEW website too quickly... could potentially... see that website receive some temporary penalty"

It's not hard for the search engines to determine (via their algorithms) what a natural rate of growth for a brand new website is in relation to incoming link generation.

They can easily work out averages, peaks and troughs, and ebbs and flows in the natural progression of things. These are not hard calculations for a computer to make given the size of the sample data they have available.

If the search engines find a brand new domain (that they have never identified and crawled before), and then finds 10,000 incoming links pointing at that domain within a 24 hour period, then that's probably well outside the range of the "normal incoming linking parameters" of the algorithm.

It could very well receive a temporary penalty as a result.

As far as knowing what the upper limit is (how many incoming links you can add to a brand new domain in a very short time frame) - you'd be very hard pressed to find anyone outside the top dogs at the search engines that could quantify this.

It's also completely irrelevant if you remain sensible about things.

What I do know is that I've created brand new websites in the past (and still do), and have thrown a few thousand incoming links at the domain - from the day of creation and placed over the space of a week (read as several hundred new links per day) - and have not seen any negative impacts whatsoever (in multiple niche markets).

Quite the opposite in fact.

From that point you can then start ramping things up and quite safely add several hundred new incoming links each day without any detriment.

So if you want to err on the side of caution here, my advice would be to wait a while (a month, 2 months or 3 months after the website is first discovered by the search engines) before you start getting really aggressive at your link building.

Once it has matured to the point where it's no longer being "judged" as being a brand new website, then the world becomes your oyster as to just how aggressive you want to get with your link building campaigns.

If you're looking to purchase text link advertising, and have a minimum budget of $1,000 p/m please contact me right now...

Duncan Carver - admin@onlinemarketingtoday.com

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