As 2012 already brings its share of changes to search engine algorithms and new implementations of existing features (of course, Google+ jumps to mind), it is truly amazing how so many so-called SEO practitioners persist in relying on absurd link building techniques that bring absolutely no benefit to their overall online marketing strategies once they are done with their web design endeavors. Search engines are now incredibly complex and powerful, and it is no secret that the world is search engine optimization is no longer the simple and easy to abuse activity it once was.
Consequently, link building activities that used to be effective at one point have become in many cases completely useless. Many techniques that were extremely useful and that everybody would thus use no longer work, and we are still seeing many of those becoming less and less effective as search engines keep evolving and get increasingly better at identifying attempts to con their algorithms. If you want to indulge in link building, the following techniques are those that are not actually benefiting your website.
Commenting on tons of blogs
The blog commenting technique used to be extremely popular. As its name suggests, it involves finding blogs and commenting on posts. Most of the time, the link building aspect came in trying to insert your link in the comment itself. However, because these links were never coded as HTML, it became easier to instead have the link in the Website textbox and with whatever was input in the Name textbox becoming the anchor.
Blog commenting is now however a huge waste of time as a link building technique for everybody involved. This is because the link almost never sticks. Spam comments consisting of absolutely nothing relevant to the post can be spotted one million miles away and will in most cases not even be seen as one of the numerous anti-spam plugins available block your comments. Moreover, the use of nofollow effectively devalues whatever benefit that link could have brought. Blog commenting does have its usefulness in other aspects but link building definitely is not one of them.
Directory submissions
Similarly, submitting to generic directories that already harbor one million links including one hundred thousand to Viagra websites is just a waste of time and resources. Directory submissions can be useful as long as you know what you’re doing and more importantly, as long as the directories involved are moderated and actually professional. However, if you are going around submitting to each and every single directory you find without any consideration for its quality, you are simply wasting your time.
Mass submission to social bookmark websites
Another technique too many people are still using is submitting their links to numerous social bookmark websites that barely have any real users. While links from these websites are quite useful at getting a new website indexed and can help with link diversity, the nature of these social networks means you will never actually get a ranking boost through them alone.
This comes down to two main reasons that are fairly obvious. Firstly, these social bookmark websites do not actually have users keen in participating on the website. The other users are also doing the exact same thing of dropping their links there and not giving a toss about what happens beyond that, let alone go around commenting and sharing on other people’s links.
The second reason is just that; with so many people going ahead and submitting so many websites on a daily basis, links from these social bookmarks no longer have much value. It is safe to assume that search engines can easily label these social bookmark websites for what they actually are, that is a huge pool of spam. You would indeed be better off using that time to invest in real link building techniques such as guest posting and link baiting.
Ashvin is an online marketing specialist from Ile de la Réunion (Reunion Island) in the Indian Ocean. He is also a writer at the Economie and Formation professionnelle blogs on the Région Réunion website.
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