SEO Expert Blog

SEOs lust for traffic. Many of them would sell their own mother to get a link from a high traffic site. The problem is that such deals are rarely offered, so there is a need for different link building techniques.

A Google search for link building tips yields more than 29.000 results. More than enough to spent months reading articles on how to become a successful Web publisher.

When clicking through these results you'll find some great articles about link building. You'll also find link building tips from the ever growing group of would-be SEOs who do more harm than good by sharing their thoughts and recommending link building approaches like the following that help wasting your time, but not in generating traffic.

Use auto submit services for search engines and Web directories

Auto submit services that submit your site to multiple search engines and Web directories have existed for a long time. Some auto submit providers charge for their services, others offer them for free. What you will get in most cases is a lot of spam mail, since you are required to leave your e-mail address when filling in the submit form.

There are thousands of search engines and Web directories but only very few of them have a considerable amount of users and visitors. To get your site indexed by search engines, link to it from another site that is regularly crawled. The search engine robots will do the rest for you.

What about Web directories? Do you use Web directories to find stuff on the web? If your answer is yes, than consider those you use for submitting your site. Do it manually, there cannot be too many of them. Avoid those that link many spammy looking sites.

Leave comments on pages that do follow

This is not a bad approach per se, but it is a bad idea to post comments, such as Great article thanks a lot and enter competitive keywords as your name since the corresponding field is used as anchor text.

Doing so on all sites you find that allow for reader's comments without devaluing the URL field by using nofollow may result in many webmasters being pissed off and turning on nofollow for the URL field and links in the comment text.

Moreover those webmasters, including myself, may consider this comment spam and feel a strong urge to not get any more comments from you and thus report your site to spam protection services like akismet or mollom. If the latter happens often enough your link building efforts will have the converse effect.

If you have something to say about an article, do it. If the URL field link is nofollowed, still do it. Comments that stand out in respect of the stated opinion will attract the attention of other people reading the article. They may consider following the link to your site.

Find topics that attract lots of people and write about them

Again this is not something inherently bad. In fact, it is a good idea if you find topics you are interested in yourself. Unfortunately, that is not always the case. Writing about a topic you are not interested in is not only arduous for you, but also for the readers.

Readers who notice that your only intention is to bait for links may feel offended and react accordingly. Even if readers do not assume anything evil, reading lame stories on topics they like will not raise any interest in visiting your site again. Once more you achieved the contrary of what you desired.

Link your sites on your eBay About me page

eBay and many other sites with community features offer profile pages for their members. In many cases you can link to your homepage from your profile page. Of course this won't do any harm, unless it is a community of black hat SEOs, but it doesn't seem to make much sense either.

Actually, this post by Germany's top yigg user and some blog reactions triggered the idea for writing this article.

The eBay About me tip was hailed by some bloggers as if it were the holy grail for contemporary link building. And it looks like some of them are willing to build a link network on members.ebay.de.

So who will benefit from such a link? I can imagine that eBay power sellers may receive some traffic, but the vast majority of eBay users will not. The value of such a link for search engine rankings should be very low, provided your About me page is indexed at all. Mine is not even though it has existed for several years.

The point here is, that a link is generally something good, unless you are in a bad neighborhood. But instead of wasting time creating community profiles and stuffing them with outbound links you better spend your time creating good content and improving your site, so other people link it voluntarily.