Getting Links - The Wrong Way

Usually, ineffective link builders chant the mantra

More social bookmarking, blog commenting, forum posting and article marketing!

Let's look at their methods in the cold light of day.

Social bookmarking

Using social bookmarking, you can actually bring copious amounts of traffic to your website. However, you need new content to bookmark each time you use this method. You can't keep bookmarking the same web page. Therefore, to maintain a continual stream of visitors using social bookmarking, you need to keep publishing a constant flow of material. This is called "work". Whenever "work" is involved, you need to be making an estimation of what your return on investment is. If it takes 3 hours to create a blog post that you bookmark, for example, and you then receive 1,000 visitors from Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon etc, you need to be thinking about how much money those extra visitors might make you. If your Adsense eCPM is $2, for another example, you could estimate that those extra 1,000 visitors are worth a measly $2. You just worked for $0.66 / hour!

It's possible that those visitors that your social bookmarking summoned may become repeat visitors, but this is the exception rather than the rule. If it was the rule, you wouldn't need to do so much social bookmarking.

It's also possible that your website naturally produces a lot of new content regularly as a matter of course. This kind of site is better suited to SBM than a static site.

In summary, social bookmarking requires time and effort on your part that may not produce a good ROI. The irony is that many webmasters mistakenly believe that it's the act of creating "fresh content" and then social bookmarking it that lead to good and sustained traffic levels. The reality is that it's the qualities of the content itself that persuade traffic to come: only if you are naturally producing content regularly should you take advantage of the traffic boost that social bookmarking may potentially bring. And expect that boost to be short lived.

I'm sure there are exceptions where really good quality content that is bookmarked is rewarded by server melting volumes of traffic that keeps coming back - and that is to be applauded.

Blog Commenting

Usually blog comments are nofollowed, meaning that they pas no SEO value to the linked site. Some sneaky blog owners actually incorporate comment links without nofollow on them to attract commenting activity and then add the nofollow at a later date when their site is popular. This removes all SEO benefit from those comment links, making any time spent on blog commenting for SEO purposes a complete waste of time.

That's the nofollow attribute addressed. But even if the comment links are not nofollowed, they are poor quality links for the following reasons:

• Links from related sites are more powerful than links from unrelated sites. Invariably, blog commenters bung their link on any ole' blog, even if it is unrelated to their own site. Not much SEO benefit there.
• Even if the commenter leaves their link on a related blog, the vast array of unrelated links will dilute their value. Imagine how little value Google et al will assign to a link when it has for company other links to pharma, debt consolidation, poker and acai berry sites.
• Blog posts often (not always, though) have low PR/minimal SEO value pages, meaning low SEO benefit passed by their links.
• If there are many, many links on a particular blog post, SEO value is distributed amongst them all. The more outbound links a page has, the less value each link passes to the linked site. And just because your chosen blog post doesn't have many comments on now, it doesn't mean that that will always be the case.

Forum Posting

For reasons similar to those above, links embedded in forum posts and signature links are bad news. Namely:

• There is too much variety in links on any particular page.
• The forum thread has low PR and "authority".
• There are too many links on each page.

Both sig links and blog comments represent self placed links. Given that the whole point of assigning a value to a link is that the link is analogous to a "vote", how much value do you think there is in a vote for your own website? It's a somewhat biased opinion, don't you think? So, if we accept that a search engine ideally wouldn't want to attribute too much value to self placed links, the next question is whether search engines can detect them. My guess is they can.

Article Marketing

Article marketing usually comprises writing an article and mass submitting it to any article site that will accept it. The article is published on the article site and features a link back to the author's site. Hey - that's a link yay! Yes, but it's a poor quality link. Invariably the web page on which the article appears has low PR/authority/standing and so can't confer any significant value to the author's site via that link.

To make matters worse, submitting an article to multiple article repositories introduces the problem of duplicate content. Duplicate content ideally gets filtered out of the search engines' results, so you may only be benefitting from one low quality link and not many.

And on top of all that, the greater the number of sites your article appears on, the lower the value of each one. Really, you should be thinking about the exclusivity of your content. If your content appears in only one place - your site - then that increases the value of your site in the eyes of your readers. Now they must come to your site to get their fix of your irreverent humour and incisive wit, because they can't get it anywhere else. You're monopolising your own content, how fiendishly clever. There ought to be a law against it.