The SEO team here at Dental Design have been saying for a long while now, that whilst link building is great for adding authority to websites, (we do it as part of the classic+ and premier packages) spammy back links are a definite no-no!
This point was highlighted by Google with regards to online flower retailer Interflora. The company was recently penalised and dropped from the search engine results pages, due to their poor back link profile. Luckily for them, they are now back up and ranking (but not quite as highly) as Google do give you the opportunity to rectify the issue and will recrawl your website, however how quickly this process takes, is a bit of a ‘how long is a piece of string’ situation.
The reason that Interflora got into so much trouble, is due to the company using a paid link campaign in conjunction with newspapers and bloggers. This resulted in spammy unrelated links pointing back to their website.
“Selling links (or entire advertorial pages with embedded links) that pass PageRank violates our quality guidelines, and Google does take action on such violations,”
“We recommend you avoid selling (and buying) links that pass PageRank in order to prevent loss of trust, lower PageRank in the Google Toolbar, lower rankings, or in an extreme case, removal from Google’s search results” Said Matt Cutts, Google Engineer.
For ideas on how to build a quality back link structure, one way is to add your website to local directories in relevant categories. A further option is to ask colleagues in your field to add a link to your website on their site, which would then create a relevant link and will probably add more authority than if you were to add your website to a spammy page used purely for link building purposes.
If you have any questions or concerns regarding link building for your website, give Dental Design a call on 01202 677 277 and a member of the seo team will be happy to go through this with you.