We’ve all had a dumb idea or two in our life, right? Today, I’m going to cover a number of common link building schemes that are either worthless, or could get you a penalty from Google, or both.
The really sad part is–with some of these, I’ve seen agencies charging money for these kinds of links.
#1 The Blackhat Google Redirect Page
All Google subdomains have a way you can add a parameter to the URL that’s a URL itself, and it creates a page on that subdomain with a followed link back to that URL, like this.
You can do this with any combination of subdomains (www, cse, images, etc.) and Google root domains (google.com, google.com.au, google.ca, etc.). Apparently there’s about 500 combinations of these. So…you put up a dumb page somewhere that Google will crawl with all these links on it, and Shazam…you’ve got 500 links from DA90+ sites, right?
Well…sort of. Moz counts these links, so your DA score from Moz goes up. But Google isn’t counting them.
Link sellers are using this to artificially inflate their Moz DA, so that they can charge more for link placements.
#2 “Google Stacking”
A client of mine had hired a company to do some link building for them, and this company was creating meaningless Google docs with a dump of keywords and a link in the middle of it back to the target page.
Again…yippee, another link from a DA90+ domain! Again…this kind of link isn’t going to pass really any link juice. Because it’s not the overall links to the domain that contribute to PageRank–it’s the link juice to that page that contribute to that page’s PageRank.
In a normal website, link juice from external links to all/most of the pages on the site end up positively impacting all the other pages on the site, because each page typically has a menu full of links to the major pages…which then have links in them to the child or detail pages in that section. Whether it’s product category pages linking to products within the category, or blog articles linking back to their category archives pages, which link to other articles in that category, this is how link juice flows to the rest of the site. And it’s why, in general, if you’ve built up a solid domain authority, all pages on your site will have more PageRank and typically rank better than a site with a weaker domain authority.
You won’t get penalized for this, but it’s really not going to help. Unless of course you build a ton of good links to those Google docs, in which those pages WILL have PageRank and link juice to pass along to their outbound links. But no more so than a similar page on a super weak domain. John Locke did this video which explains why this is a bad idea back in 2019.
It’s interesting to note that a twist on this used to work, actually. You’d create these Google docs, then you’d spend a little money on spammy links from directories, article farms, etc. And then, the page would have at least a little PageRank to pass, because for a LONG time, Google was still actually counting links from those places. I’d say in the past 2-3 years though Google has gotten much better at ignoring those kinds of links and passing no link juice at all from them.
#3 Creating Freebie Subdomains
This is a bit like Google Stacking. There’s a bunch of root domains out there where you can get your own subdomain from them. The most notorious of these is probably blogspot.com (owned by Google). While there ARE some legitimate little blogs hosted on those subdomains, I’d say that of all of the blogspot sites I’ve reviewed in my clients’ backlinks (and I’ve reviewed many thousands of them), maybe 1 to 3% of them are really somebody’s blog. The rest are mostly one-page sites where someone has copied and pasted the same article (with a link in it of course) dozens or hundreds of times.
I have a client (who shall remain nameless) who, a few years back, discovered that spammers were going to town on them, and they removed over 2 million of these subdomains.
I’m seeing lots of people use netlify.app (DA 93) and vercel.app (DA 91) to do the same thing. But again, it’s not the domain authority that matters! All the links to those big-name root domains are passing link juice–yes–but that is NOT getting passed down to your craptastic one-pager http://sillyideas.vercel.app/ you built. Sorry.
#4 E-Press Releases
This tactic is pretty old, but Google has been ignoring these kinds of links for over ten years. In fact, at Pubcon in 2013, Google’s Matt Cutts said “Google identified the sites that were press release syndication sites and simply discounted them”. More interesting reading about that here.
This doesn’t mean press releases are necessarily bad–but they’re not a way to build links that Google’s going to count towards PageRank, and make your site rank better.
#5 Asking Journalists to Add a Link to An Existing Article
You know, this really wouldn’t be a bad idea…if it worked. But for the most part, if the article was published a while ago (a) they get asked this all the time and it’s just a waste of their time (and yours), and (b) often they don’t have access to edit an article after it’s been published. PR guru Britt Klontz goes into this in detail in her Digital PR Explained podcast.
#6 Forum Profile Links
Here, you register as a new user in some forum, and fill out your member profile, including a link to your website. Now, your profile page probably receives next to zero link juice, so even if that gets indexed it’s not going to pass any meaningful link juice. If you stop there, you’ve wasted your time.
Having said that: if it’s a forum that’s relevant to your business, and you do actually actively engage in discussions: answering other people’s questions, contributing, etc., those thread pages can build up some Page Rank and…IF the profile links next to posters’ names are actually followed…those CAN pass some link juice. And, they’ll pass relevance signals as well. Let’s say it’s a Chevelle muscle car forum (I’ve had 2 1969 Chevelles over the years), and you’re selling synthetic engine oil. Your comments on threads about what oil to use are legit and relevant, and those pages will be full of keywords and topics that are relevant to your site.
Even if the links were nofollowed, you’re probably going to get some people actually clicking your links and turning into customers. But treat this as something you’re doing for real customers, not for links. If you get some link juice from it…bonus!
#7 Social Bookmarking
Oh, and yes, I know about the wording in that sign. I asked ChatGPT 3x to fix the words in the sign, and it kept giving me “Social Borboirking”. Sam Altman must be a fan of the Swedish chef. It’s AI…it must be right :-).
Lots of folks on Fiverr are STILL selling “social bookmarking” links. As Barry Schwartz noted in this Search Engine Roundtable article a couple of years ago, “Truth is, I don’t know many SEOs who still use these strategies. They were link building strategies maybe 15 or more years ago, but post Penguin, I have not seen this strategy used much.” There’s a reason you can get these links starting at $5…you get what you pay for!
H/T to Darren Shaw of Whitespark for suggesting this. I’m kinda blown away that this is still a thing.
#8 Private Blog Networks
These are collections of websites all owned by the same organization. They build up PageRank and domain authority mostly by linking between the sites. Problem is, link analysis tools freely available to you and me (I really like SEMRush’s link graphs) make it CRYSTAL clear that this is not legit. Here’s a SEMRush link graph for a private network of directory sites (it’s really the same thing–PBNs typically have articles instead of just business listings though):
Google has had their own set of tools that do the same thing for many, many years. I think it was Matt Cutts who showed a tool he uses at a conference. He talks about it in this article from 2005.
That’s TWENTY FRIGGIN YEARS AGO.
#9 Sitewide Footer Links
You’ll see a lot of web design firms put links back to their website in the footer on every page of sites they build for clients. While this can be helpful for getting new clients (presuming you did a bang-up job and the person looking at that site likes your work), it’s not going to pass any PageRank to your site. Google can easily see that it’s on all pages of the site, and knows darn well that it’s not part of a block of content talking about what a swell product you have.
Google recommends nofollowing those sorts of links – see this article from Search Engine Roundtable.
WPMU, a well-known WordPress portal, famously drew a Penguin penalty for doing this. These days, you won’t get a penalty–those links just get ignored.
#10 Site Reputation Abuse
This one was suggested to me by Cyrus Shepard (who by the way recently launched a very useful list of reputable marketing companies called Zyppy List). And it comes in two flavors:
- Buying links from off-topic sections of sites with really strong domain authority
- Buying expired domains in the hopes of taking advantage of the old site’s inbound links
For many, many years, there were a number of trusted, household-name sites where for money, you could get a link…in a “special” section. Sites like CNN and Forbes had “shopping and recommendation” sections, which clearly had nothing to do with their core businesses. You can still buy links from a number of university .edu websites, including a whole bunch of Ivy League schools’ sites. While Google with their Site Reputation Abuse penalties has initially focused on the coupon and affiliate/shopping types of this tactic, I’d expect them to go after the .edu sites as well at some point.
Part of what’s in play isn’t penalties, but rather, algorithmic changes that appear to be weighting content based on whether the site appears to be an authority in that type of content. Hubspot recently lost a ton of rankings and traffic–but it was for topics like “famous quotes” and “how to type the shrug emoji”. See Aleyda Solis’ excellent analysis of that here. What we don’t know yet is whether Google is simply devaluing that content because it’s off-topic for the publisher, or whether it’s impacting link juice that might be passed by that content.
Either way, if you’re on the link buying train, I’d steer clear of links from sites where there’s little topical overlap between that site’s core focus and your own website’s focus.
On the expired domains front, there’s two reasons to avoid going after these. #1, when you see a domain with a strong backlink profile go up for sale, often it’s because it’s been penalized and no longer gets traffic. You sure don’t want that penalty transferred to your own site–you don’t even want links associating you with penalized sites! #2, unless that domain is very much in line with the topics your own website focuses on, Google isn’t likely to give much weight to any links you might get from that site. And, unless you carefully rebuild most of the pages on that old site that had external links, at best all you’d be able to pass along would be some link juice from the home page.
#11 Cloaked Reciprocal Links
This one comes from Paddy Moogan, who’s probably one of the best-known white-hat link builders on the planet. Reciprocal links have been around a long time: typically, you and another website would each have a “Resources” page on your site, and in there would be a link back to the home page of the other website.
A little of this is fine with Google–if you actually do work with another business, it’d be totally normal for each site to link to the other. But Google has said that excessive link exchanges are link spam.
A clever little trick some folks have come up with is to send reciprocal link requests…but they cloak the site so that regular users (i.e. the person giving a link) sees their link, but Google don’t see it. So for Google, they see a one way link. For the user and person giving the reciprocal link, they see a two-way link.
If you’ve exchanged links with another site, and are wondering if you’re a victim of this scheme, just use Max Prin’s Fetch and Render tool and fetch that page as if you were Googlebot, and see if your link is there.
#12 Blog Comment Spam
This tactic is older than prostitution. Don’t bother. Even if you can get past the Akismets of the world, Google is able to spot this kind of stuff through things like link velocity (tons of links all showing up at the same time), plus if a blog’s comments are wide open and provide followed links, Google’s going to see so many porn, gambling, and pharma links on that same blog that they already know nothing there is trustworthy.