Buying backlinks can indeed be dangerous for your Google rankings. We are happy to explain what to look out for. There appears to be a lot of uncertainty about which links are good for your backlink profile and which links can harm your rankings. Of course we do not want you to be harmed and would like to protect you from bad backlinks. Often bad backlinks are offered very cheaply. You can often assume that the link does not meet the following quality requirements:
- Relevance; the content from which the links come should match the content on your site as much as possible
- Manually Created; Cheap backlinks are often created with automated tools and these tools can leave footprints that are easy for Google to track.
- Unique Custom Written Content; The texts used are often “spun texts”. These are texts that come from articles that are structured in such a way that many articles can be made from 1 article that have the same content but different words, sentence structure and with really well-spun texts also have a different paragraph structure. If the texts are too similar, this is also easy to detect by Google. Another technique that is widely used for low-cost link building strategies is the web “scraping of texts” or stealing copyrighted texts from other sites. These texts are often simply passed through the Google translator in order to generate somewhat unique texts. Since Google owns the Google translator itself, it is very easy for Google to find out and punish these tactics.
- Link Type Variation; if the links only come from directories, for example, this is not a natural link profile. Variation in link type such as article links, social links, ad link, blog comment and forum link (not too many forum profile links) is desirable.
- Strong Domain; A domain valued by Google with a natural backlink profile, (see Ahrefs.com under the Inbound Link tab for the link progression of new links and the anchor text variation. for certain keywords).
- Healthy Domain History; A good history, no wrong content, spam, virus injections, hacked sites, mallware, etc. (see archive.org)
- Domains on unique A, B and C-Class IP addresses; If the link builder does not have the domains on different C-Class IP addresses, this is easy to find out by Google. You can easily check this yourself with the Ahrefs tool. When Google discovers a network of sites, Google will roll up this network and any backlink value you had will disappear. You have lost your investment and cheap is suddenly expensive. Many link builders think that they can easily solve this with SEO Hosting, but this type of hosting also leaves a large footprint. Unfortunately, you can hardly check this yourself.
- Various Whois data; When all domains have the same Whois data, it is immediately clear to Google that someone is trying to influence the rankings. You can easily check this yourself by checking the Whois data of .nl domains at Sidn.nl and for most other domain extensions at Domaintools.com.
Quality and sustainability come at a price
Our link building services are focused on quality and sustainability. Before we start the work, we always first check the current state of your website and backlink profile before we get started. We will always want to achieve an optimal link profile and will therefore first look at the link profile of the highest ranking competitors in Google and compare the current link profile with this and report what the objective is. As a general rule you can assume that the longer we work for you, the more time we put into analysis, setting out the optimal strategy, establishing an optimal link profile and of course beating the top competition in Google. In addition, we always ensure that we have full control over the places where we create links. So if you want to remove or adjust links in the future, that is always possible.
Which backlinks can hurt your Google rankings?
There are quite a few cowboys and amateurs who think they can create some backlinks and make money quickly. They often use automated link building tools with which they can quickly create backlinks for all kinds of websites. Be especially careful with various internet marketing forums and sites like fiverr.com where you can buy cheap links. When many of these types of links are created in a short time, this can damage your Google rankings. Some types of sites that are commonly used for automated link building practices are:
- Social bookmarking websites
- Wiki sites
- Advertentie sites
- Link farm links (free for all, geen moderatie dus veel spam links)
- Forum profile links
- Startpagina clone links (onze ervaring is dat deze links eerder schade toebrengen dan goed doen)
Now it is not necessarily the case that when you get links from those sites, they by definition harm your Google rankings. This would be very rigorous and is not desirable for Google. For example, Twitter or Pinterest would be under a social bookmarking site and that would mean that all sites that have a link from Twitter would be damaged. This is of course not the case and this also applies to the lesser quality social bookmarking sites. However, creating backlinks in bulk is a dangerous activity. This means that suddenly many links are created (rapid unnatural link growth) where often many the same anchor texts and many the same or very similar texts are used. A rapid growth of links can be natural at, for example, a product launch or when a website is mentioned on TV, but usually this is not natural and Google can easily discover this when the texts and anchor texts are very similar.
Which backlinks are good for your Google rankings?
As can be seen from the foregoing, an unnatural accumulation of backlinks can be an indicator that someone is trying to influence search results to his or her advantage. Google’s filter will pick this up after which other filters will be released and in a very obvious case of large-scale ranking manipulation it will even ring a bell that a manual inspection is required. In a manual inspection all traces will be checked and all unnatural links will be devalued so that they no longer affect the ranking result and spam sites will be de-indexed so that they can no longer pass on link value. Some examples of backlinks that are good for your Google rankings:
- Article links: if properly applied in a natural way, links from articles on other sites and which are seen by Google as sites of different owners will be very good for your Google rankings. After all, you will be written about and if it is not optimized in the anchor text for a certain keyword, the effect is favorable. However, Google will not see a cluster of sites on the same C-Class IP hosting linking to your site as natural and this will seem like someone with many sites on 1 hosting account is trying to influence the ranking of the site linked to. is going to be. Even if the domain name registration data is the same, Google will draw the same conclusions.
- Business directory links: Business directories often provide more information about a business and are somewhat of an enrichment for the internet. These web guides also shape the internet because the entries are categorized and also at the local level. Google can organize the web better this way and therefore benefits from these guides. In addition, these guides are almost always well moderated so that there is almost no spam to be found.
- Directory links: Provided these sites are well moderated, no spam can be found on them and these links are used with moderation they will make a positive contribution to your link profile. Obviously not every directory link is equally strong. Often the directories need to build some reputation. However, when the texts are unique, the links also come from unique C-Class IPs, then these links also have a positive influence on the Google rankings. The oldest and considered by many to be the strongest directory is DMOZ. Nowadays it is not easy to get into this web guide anymore because the moderation is pretty bad for many categories. This is because this guide is maintained by volunteers and not paid for it. If you manage to get into this directory, you can expect to be included in other web directories as well, as many directories take over the info from DMOZ 1 on 1.
- Social Media Links: Although this is denied by Google, our experience is that these links do help to higher rankings. This could also be due to the snowball effect that these types of links can cause. It’s kind of soft word of mouth advertising.
- Video Links: Many video upload sites allow you to post a link to your site. This is also the case with Youtube. In addition to the high traffic that YouTube videos can pass on to your site (especially when your video ranks in the natural search results of Google), a very targeted link from a video that is appreciated by the viewers is of course well taken into account. Again, moderation is an asset here. Do not buy cheap video packages where the videos and description are almost the same and the quality and shareability are hard to find.
- Advertisement Links: These links can help your site to better rankings with moderation. More important, however, is the number of targeted and buying visitors that these sites can send to your website. When you have a well-formulated ad and advertise in a niche and on keywords that visitors to that site search for, you can count on quite a few clicks and perhaps sales.
How can you detect and remove bad links?
Detecting bad links (link detox) is now fairly easy with the help of one of the following tools:
If it appears that there are bad links pointing to your site, you should follow the steps listed on the next page:
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
If you cannot find a solution, let us know and we will track down the bad links for you, try to have them removed and in the latter case we will enter them in the Google disavow tool and do when necessary (with Google penalty or warning) a reconsideration request. Go here to order good backlinks and to the contact page for help in removing bad backlinks.
Do you have a great plan and / or a great webshop with a lot of potential and do you miss the budget to invest in good SEO and link building? Then contact us and convince us of your plan and the growth potential. When we think your idea has enough potential, we are highly motivated to make a success of your plan together with you.
