Links Can Hurt Your Website Too: Why Not All Links Are Created Equal
You may have read this headline and thought to yourself, “Wait… A link is a link right? What’s the difference?”
Well, believe it or not, there actually is a huge difference between the type of links that can help your website with your search engine ranking and the type of links that can hurt your search engine ranking.
Links that help your website:
Good links are links to or from other high quality websites that have been deemed as valuable by the search engines. Links from authority websites help increase your search engine results, and help you get found more often. The same is true for industry-related websites that are updated frequently with fresh content.
For example, if you are a dog groomer, links from a pet store or veterinarian would been seen as more valuable than a link from a CPA’s website.
Examples of good links:
- Links to/from resources that relate to the content
- Links to/from more information on the topic
- Links to/from other valuable businesses in the industry
- Links to/from trade association
- Links to/from other points of view on the topic
Links that hurt your website:
Bad links are links to or from other websites that search engines have deemed as low quality, been associated with spam, operate as link farms, or practice unethical search engine optimization practices. The same is true for websites that have zero relevancy to your business or your target market. These links actually hurt your search engine results.
Examples of bad links:
- Links to/from a link farm website
- Links to/from spam websites / emails
- Links to/from a website with no relevance to the content
- Links to/from an explicit website
- Deceptive links that lead the user somewhere unexpected
Do you know of other good or bad link information? If so, please share it with me!
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Comments
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Ryan L says:
Great tips. I enjoyed your article below too on design. You included the perfect picture too.
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[...] what most small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t understand is that not all links are created equal. In fact, some links can help your website and some links can hurt your website.Think of it like [...]
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I agree all links are not created equally. However, I question how much a “bad link” can hurt your website. If that were true wouldn’t it be easy for companies to sabotage your website by creating links from all the worst places?
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Joe – Bad links can detract from your ranking and results. That is why it is just as important to monitor the inbound links to your site as it is to create them. Being a brand and website guardian is an important factor in search engine optimization. You’ve got to monitor what is going on and ask for links to be removed, indexed pages to be removed, and snippets that have been created to be removed when appropriate.
