Can you get penalized for building links? The answer is yes.
Some marketers term such penalty as -50 penalty. Some call it -30 penalty. Whatever name you call it, the idea is the same. You are maxed at certain ranking no matter what happen.
To find out if you are slapped with such penalty is simple. Do a Google search for a unique phrase in your webpage and see what is your ranking. Under normal circumstances, you should be on the 1st position, since there is no competition for that unique phrase. But if you are slapped with -50 penalty, you will notice that your website is found on the 51st position.
Such penalty is implemented manually, i.e. someone actually access your website and determine if you should be penalized and how ‘deep’ in the ranking you should be penalized. Google doesn’t go round checking on people’s sites. Usually something must have triggered its alert, so that an investigation is launched.
Let’s be realistic. Who don’t build links? The key here is don’t trigger the manual investigation.
How Not To Trigger Manual Investigation?
No one really knows what triggers Google’s alert system. Your best bet is to play safe. Build links slowly and from a host of varying websites of different nature. Remember, everything is relative. You can be building thousands of crap links to Wikipedia and it won’t harm Wikipedia a bit. But if you build such links to a site with no link history, you are likely to get into trouble. There isn’t a fixed rule as in how fast you should build links or how many links you should build from one site or for one site.
Also, don’t publicly boast about your link building success. Tipping off is one major reason why Google launch an investigation, because when someone complains, Google needs to take action. One annoying truth is sometimes you may rank high in a keyword that a rich company is trying to rank for, and instead of working harder to beat you, that company will engage a lawyer to write to Google, claiming that you build links. Google will need to answer to that lawyer by launching an investigation. It’s unfair, but that’s part of the game.
What If I Don’t Built Links. Isn’t It The Safest?
Yes, if you don’t build links at all, you are 100% safe. But chances are you will also not achieve any good ranking in Google.
Can I Sabotage A Website By Building Links To It?
You see, if a website can be penalized for link building, it means you can sabotage a website by building tons of junk links to it and get it penalized. Theoretically yes. But bear in mind that every penalty is human reviewed. If the reviewer sees that the website has got great content and has tons of different backlinks from different sources, chances are it will not take any drastic action against the site.
So What Is The Best Practice?
The best practice begins from your website. Build quality website that Google is proud to present to its users. Next, promote the website by building links. Build links for the objective of gaining direct traffic from that link, such as promoting your site in the forum or posting articles in article directories. Avoid building links for the sake of links. If you stick to this practice, you should be quite safe.
Seems like everyone is trying to get their business on the 1st Page of Google. Now I see many companies claiming to be able to get your business on the first page of Google. Isn’t that what backlinking is all about?
The step Google took here is not good.Everyone wants to see there site at top page of Google by performing good SEO task.I don’t think there’s other way to do that without building links.
Too many spam links will always get you the risk of the dreaded sandbox! Google are getting much wiser and thats why 10k+ spam links no longer will help you rank – good organic links from site with good authority will help soo much more and i’d like to say good tip from the author about building over time as we should do in all our online business ventures!
The thing most people overlook is getting #1 on Google means NOTHING if your website doesn’t convert once they get there. That should tell you where to put your effort first.
Wow! At last I got a webpage from where I can really take valuable information regarding my study and knowledge.
Great info!
A good internet marketer should understand the importance of website contents before going for link building. Without useful content, what is the point of searching info online?
To apply this, why you are here? This is because we would like to improve our knowledge from reading articles on Leadsleap’s blog.
Didn’t you agree on this?
Yes, quality content first of all and then quality link building, slowly and naturally over time. There is no shortcut.
Just got out of a Google 50 penalty. Learnt my lesson the hard way. Nothing beats slow and steady link buildng.
Some guru has told me that article directory is still good source to building some quality link.
Thank You for the information on backlinks. Plenty to Consider when writing quality content.
I am glad that you share your knowledge about marketing.
You really know what you are doing.
It shows that you are learning as well as growing in learning the latest marketing strategies and the rules of the game.
Thanks.
Thanks Kenneth for that amazing post on link building. It is very informative as with all your posts. Cheers brother.
Kevin
Thanks for the great information,will have to check my sites to see how they rank.
Thanks
Clarence
Thanks Ken for providing another article. Link building is definitely something that requires effort, time and a lot of patience. Appreciate it!
Kevin
I agree with other comments – the first priority has to be building a good quality site with information that people actually want to read. If I am searching for something through Google, it doesn’t matter whether the link is on Page 1 or Page 10, if the site is rubbish I won’t stick around (much less buy anything from it.) That said, when you have good content, you want to work on getting as close to the top in the Big G as possible.
Time and again Google has re-inforced the fact that nothing beats quality link building (the slower the better) and fresh updated content on blogs and websites. Stick ti this and you can never go wrong.
Sometimes, you got to understand that the link building will come naturally if your site showing good information for the searchers.
Some of online sites would be happy to link direct and pointing to your good website.
Another thing is for increasing your website popularity, you have to get relevant link in and as much as possible to gain more traffics. This is because traffic is money.
However, that is no magic in making money online or make money overnight. If you come across those programs promised of making money in the short terms, leave them quickly.
I like the way you described about how to find out if your site is penalized or not. This is so great. Tested it for some of my sites. Works like a charm. Thank you.
The fact that google assigns priority to websites that have links pointing them is a farce. The original concept was that websites that had valuable content would be linked to from other websites as a natural occurrence. That is not the case now as websmasters are gaming the system by artificially generating links to their websites using various methods. This is just another example of how googles search algorithm is just a bunch of hyped up nonsense. I get much more relevant search results from bing and yahoo. We need more competition in order to dethrone google and send them into the sandbox.
Yahoo and Bing are better than Google! Almost every search engine is.
I always warn my audience and my prospects about using those one click link bots and yet so many people fall for it I mean seriously if this was legal don’t you think the top internet marketer would be using them. This just confirms exactly hat I was saying all long.
If you have a large site with a ton of pages you have to always watch and make sure no one is putting strange links on your site like a forum, if it goes unnoticed it can trigger a penalty.
Very informative and interesting post with great information. it’s really an eye opener. i will try it out for sure.
thanks for this great info kenneth. I will try your tip.
Thanks for the information. Strangely enough, this is something I didn’t know. Very informative!
Really helpful post and some great replies.
This penalty is good news to me!
It was obvious to anyone who thought about it that sooner or later all this business of “buying” 10,000 automated links would get up G’s nose and generate a penalty. It’s so obviously spam.
Happily I very quickly decided I couldn’t afford to compete with the people buying rubbish links (even if it had sounded like a good idea!) and reverted to a completely different strategy which gives G and its readers what they want.
Bottom line: Quality links! Quality links! Quality links!
Is there any way of determining if we are close to get banned? and how can we get out of google box if we get in?
Quality does matter at the end of the day. If you build quality backlinks it might take some time but the rankings stay rock solid.
Hello, I guess I found the “-infinity” rule! I have a site that has totally disappeared from Google ratings. It is not abusive, nor does it break any of G’s rules, as far as I know.
But… what happened is lamentable: I used a system to add in PLR content, and the system broke. It failed to load the content, just titles and sometimes images, it also published everything automatically immediately. I caught this about 6 hours after the process was finished, and deleted all the posts, but I guess G got there before I did. The site was a PageRank 2 and there were some good references there, and still are indirectly (via references from other sites). But if you type in “site:mypoorwebsite.com” (not the real name!), G sends back “Your search – site:http://mypoorwebsite.com/ – did not match any documents.”
Proof of the pudding: statscrop.com lists links:
Google Indexed 0 Pages
Yahoo Indexed 358 Pages
Bing Indexed 7 Pages
Now what, coach?
dang, sorry to hear.. i was thinking plr too.. i don’t think i understand what you mean..to new i guess.. but i do know what a loss it is.. I’m wondering if theres a web sight that they can’t just ….get into our stuff without telling us first. i think ownership deserves that. nobody enters the house without a warrant.. but online..you don’t even get told why much less given opportunity to explain or anything .. i.e… goodbye my poor twitter account.. anyone want my copy of Twitterbucks? ;]
That is wrong because Yahoo is powered by Bing: they index the same amount of pages.
sometimes i truely think Google just change the alogorythm soley just to tick us off!? – we spend months doing SEO the right way (well some of us do) and then they go and change all the rules just as we have a good constant stream of traffic
im inclined to believe its to make more of go spend more money on PPC!?
anyone share the same view?
There are lots of link building services that are very reasonably priced. I use one called All Enclusive Ads you can find it just by clicking on my name and looking at my site. It will be on the right hand side
Very nice article. I certainly appreciate this website.
Keep writing!
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Great info. thanks for the update.