I’ve been meaning to post about SEO link building services and all the pitfalls, dragons and cowboys that frequent this grey* and black hat* SEO strategy for some time. Â Be warned I may subsequently vent some frustration within this prose.
But for now.
Consider this image.
Be warned there are many SEO agencies, digital marketing companies and SEO cowboys (a term given to those who lasso you in, who tend to be from super capitalist (churn and burn), high volume, high client turnover companies with dead horse strategies). These SEO link building cowboys want your money but don’t want to give you anything tangible, somewhat of a highway robber. They will sell you bad SEO link building services and pray on those ignorant to search engine optimisation. These SEO cowboys come in many forms, via phone, via email and more frequently via dead horse (SEO techniques). These guys are so brazen they even hit up SEO agencies and consultancies like ours.
In fact I would say be careful of any SEO Agency that claims to only link build or attempts to sell you link building packages on top of your SEO campaign as a way to improve your rankings. I would be doing a sharp U turn from 99% of link building services or campaigns as they will not benefit your SEO in any way and even if you do happen to receive positive and lasting results (by some miracle) then at some point Google will figure out what your link building company has done and as a result will punish you and your site.
Cue, Google’s highly aggressive anti spam Penguin Update, do you really want this Penguin knocking at your websites door?
What constitutes bad SEO link building services?
Anyone that stipulates that they will be building links in low quality sites. Hence why it is imperative that you ask them for a list of websites they plan to drop links on. CAUTION: Any site that you don’t know that is not industry/content related is probably a low quality site itself or low a quality link for your site. Either or its bad SEO link building. So where does this leave us, it pretty much allots all SEO link building services as bad. Why? because they all use blog farming environments (series of sites all linking towards one another, perfect for some eastern european website trying to sell you viagra (get the idea) your trapped in a series of sites that tend to lead you around in circles. This same technique of circle linking is being applied to SEO link building strategies. So if low quality spam sites are using this technique to sell viagra what do you think Google will do to this “black hat”/”grey hat” SEO technique and more importantly why are you blindly walking into this as a business owner? Yes, 5 years ago this would have given your site a boost, for a time. Nowadays its just as likely to get your site de listed from the index entirely. Yet, there are still people who claim that they will link build via a blanketed link dropping model. Why? Because they are dead horse riding cowboys that want to make an easy buck. Don’t let it be you or your business.
So this brings us to the definition of grey hat SEO. For many years the SEO agency world has been playing with fire dropping links on low quality blogs and websites for short term ranking gains. Now the angry penguin is having its revenge. It wasn’t strictly “black hat” SEO and it wasn’t good SEO either as evidenced by the amount of websites affected by the first Penguin update. It’s this middle ground of “grey hat” SEO that Google is catching up with real FAST. Â Penguin 2.0 is on the way so be warned. If you hired any SEO agency that built links for you, you are in Googles sights and you will be punished. Also if you are an SEO agency that is adopting these techniques then be careful who you work with or they may sue you for violating Googles guidelines.
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