Backlinks

Backlinks are one way for your site to earn some weight in the page ranking formula. If your site has quality backlinks, the search engines will recognize your site as having good information that is worth linking to, which gives your pages more ranking weight. However, you also have to be careful what kind of backlinks you link to your site. Many people hire cheap, low-class SEO firms that spam forums and buy automated link submissions. These kind of practices will get you penalized by the search engines and may even get your site banned from being indexed and ranked.

If you have ever been on internet forums, you have probably seen people join the forum and right away post something like “hey I just found a great new site _____.com”. This is a good example of spam backlinks. Even if the search engine can’t tell it is a spam link, when people do a search on your url they will see several spam posts from forums. This is also frequently unfavorable because many times people on the forum have a fun time posting negative comments about the url just because they can tell the link is spam.

Another unfavorable SEO backlink practice is automated directory submissions. Many SEO companies will buy hundreds or even thousands of backlinks for a small price and then someone with an automated script will submit your url to hundreds of directories overnight or over a few days. Search engines will recognize the automation, which is against the rules, when they see that you have hundreds of new backlinks over a short period of time. Consequently, your site will probably be penalized. Many companies claim that they are manually submitted, but realistically, it is not likely that a person can submit a site to hundreds of directories in a few hours.

Even if these kinds of links don’t get penalized, they are worth nothing or very little. Most of the search engines have caught on to these manipulations and give mass-produced, low-ranking directories no weight. Your backlinks from these types of directories are virtually worthless.

Another thing to be very leery of is buying links because this is against most search engines’ rules and you can be penalized for it. Penalization for this offense does happen quite frequently. If a website is selling links and one of their competitors reports them, then the seller and all of the links they have sold get penalized, including your site if you have purchased from them.

At Pixelply, we hand pick all of the backlinks that we help you collect to make sure that they are not only from sites that have weight in the search engines, but are also relevant to your site. Search engines want to see relevant backlinks that shows that the links mean something. If you have a car site and you have backlinks to other car related sites, this is relevant and will give your site more page weight. If you are a car site and you have backlinks to a hundred cheap junky directories, a couple of Caribbean cruise sites and a few forums with posts that were deleted or heckled, that looks like spam and your backlinks will be worthless and maybe penalized. In addition, bad backlinks do not help drive traffic to your site while well placed relevant backlinks do.

The honest and basic way backlinks are acquired is that websites with good content eventually get good backlinks because the other sites want to link to the information. The way they naturally accumulate takes years and most people like to speed up the process a little bit and create them faster, but too fast and the search engines will penalize your site because they will see it as unnatural growth and search engine manipulation.

We have developed different methods so we can find backlinks that are relevant to your category and will hold weight in the search engines. We use these methods to help you collect quality backlinks that will last and that the search engines will rank as quality links.

Backlinks are an important part of site SEO, but they must be done correctly and following search engine rules or you can end up doing more harm than good.