Bit of history:
We hired an SEO company 15 months ago to link build for us. We have recently discovered that all they have been doing is link farming. We are linked on 40 ish websites of low quality and non-relevant content. All these site are hosted in a different country and are registered to people in the far east. All the sites are simple blogs targeting a US audience (we’re in the UK). All the sites have very low Google PageRank scores and are clearly set up just to have back links on.
Could these links be hurting us rather than helping us?
Could it be clear to Google (and others) that these sites are link farms?
Are back links even that effective any more?
If so, how important should they be in our SEO plans?
I know this is a big ask, but really need some non-biased information here as we feel we a being screwed by this company.
Unfortunately you’ve had a similar experience to a lot of people who have hired external SEO consultants. While there undoubtedly are a lot of genuine SEO-ers out there who do good work and benefit their clients, there are an awful lot of cowboys and conmen around as well – see this article that ULTiMATE has pointed out elsewhere.
Could these links be hurting us rather than helping us?
Could it be clear to Google (and others) that these sites are link farms?
Are back links even that effective any more?
If so, how important should they be in our SEO plans?
It is unlikely that the links will be hurting you. Google will almost certainly have figured out that the links are from worthless link farm-type sites that have been seeded by or on behalf of your site … but it doesn’t usually actively penalise sites that have that kind of link profile. Why? Because it would then be trivially easy to destroy your competitors by setting up bazillions of dodgy links to their site. So as a general rule, if it sees dodgy links pointing to your site, Google will usually just ignore them.
Getting links to your site is effective, both in terms of promoting your site to a wider audience and for persuading Google to give you a better ranking. But only certain types of links are worthwhile. Any that you can easily generate yourself are not, for obvious reasons – Google doesn’t care about whether a website owner is promoting his/her own site, they are only interested in knowing whether other people think the site is worthy of a link. So what you need are links on ‘editorial’ pages/sections (ie, where the site owner has absolute control) from sites that are reputable, preferably in a related niche/sector, and where they are being selective about who they link to and not just splattering links to all and sundry everywhere.
I know this is a big ask, but really need some non-biased information here as we feel we a being screwed by this company.
If you’re paying for something and they’re not doing it (which is what it sounds like) then yes, you are being screwed.[/font]
Really it is big ask but link building is one of the most important matter for a website promoting. But if you follow the black hat SEO it must affect your site , yes, you can get some benefit for a short time but it very ugly for long time. Even google may banned your site though you enough knowledge about it than me. If I want to say that you do linkbuilding relevant your site and follow the white hat SEO, it is help you to get better google page rank and your site will be familiar as unique website in the online.
Link building is an important part of Search engine optimization and here I’m showcasing some of the major Benefits of Link Building for your Website. Link building is the process of building inbound links for your websites. The popularity of a website or blog is sometime determine by number of inbound links.
More visibility of your blog in search result.
High quality incoming link means your site will be admired as a valuable resource. This could be easily done by writing quality content.
Link building also helps in getting indexed in search result easily.
Link building is also considered as an important aspect of SEO.
Helps you to receive traffic from other websites linked to you.
With respect to link building, there are 2 paths linkbuilder work can be classified: link spam and value based. It should be clear link spam will necessitate less effort but won’t make long lasting links where value based requires more effort but builds links that will stand the test of time.
Incoming links from authority website is always awarded in Google search result. Effective link building doesn’t mean building unlimited links but it means getting genuine links from website which are reliable.
More visibility of your blog in search result.
High quality incoming link means your site will be admired as a valuable resource. This could be easily done by writing quality content.
Link building also helps in getting indexed in search result easily.
Link building is also considered as an important aspect of SEO.
Helps you to receive traffic from other websites linked to you.
Yes it could be harming you, after Google’s updates in 2012 spammers started contacting blogs to remove the bad links because it was harming them. Has you traffic decreased? It’s more likely to effect your rankings if your a new site or a low ranking site.
Yes, Google is very good at detecting these types of schemes.
Yes, from relevant high raking sites.
Quite important but you should also focus on offering something of value to your users. When gaining backlinks from blogs or whatever I like to think:
A) Is this site spammy or high ranking?
B) If I didn’t get “link juice” from this site would I want the traffic from there and would I receive traffic?
If you are going to get decent traffic that is targeted and interested in you industry then it is certainly worthwhile I think.
Not a big ask at all. Personally I would issue a charge back against this company as they have taken your money and not completed their side of the deal and probably you’re probably in a worse situation that originally.
Link Building is an important part of SEO. Link building helps your site in getting well rank on the search engine.
Link building is very important and is beneficial in different ways like:
1.helps in getting indexed in search engine.
2. helps in getting well rank on the search engine.
3. helps in getting more visibility to the site.
4. helps in getting more traffic to the site and many more.
Getting cheaper backlinks is worth of nothing. Those links must be degrading your site value.Getting higher PR backlinks is better.If you can get 2 high quality backlinks from high PR websites like Facebook,Twitter,Wordpress etc,it would be better than thousands of low quality backlinks.
Link Building has great benefits and that is the reason why more and more number of website owners want to get it incorporated in their SEO process.
*Links make your site – and the internet – more usable, and useful.
*Links Create Direct Traffic. More links = more traffic.
*Links Build higher page ranks.
*Links Tell Search Engines and Users What Your Pages Are About.
hi, link farms and link schemes are totally prohibited in Google quality guidelines (technical and quality)…
I would suggest to remove your backlinks from link farms if you have the access .
When you hire an SEO company some things that can indicate that they do not genuinely build links are:
They say that it will take 2 - 3 months to get your site on top SERPs
They say that they will not disclose list of sites to you because it is company secret
They are ready to bargain their prices to get your business.
Serious SEO’ers do not compromise on the time taken on promotion nor on the money, if it is well worth the time spent on it. They are transparent with what they do, the sites they use, the strategy they plan for your site and so on. I am just saying this as a general advice, not that I think you did not inquire enough.
Could these links be hurting us rather than helping us?
Could it be clear to Google (and others) that these sites are link farms?
Are back links even that effective any more?
If so, how important should they be in our SEO plans?
These links would not hurt your site. Yes there are instances of unnatural links for sites even when they are not the one who built these links. In such rare cases, if you happen to receive a unnatural links warning, simply send a reconsideration request to the search engine and give them your strategy to make things right.
BACKLINKS ARE EFFECTIVE, YES!! But of course they are not the ONLY means of getting higher search rankings. Give them about 80% importance on your SEO plan, because everything generally boils down to how popular your website is on the web and popularity is measured by the online votes that are the backlinks. Suppose I am your offline customer, I love your business and I would recommend it to a 100 other customers. Does it matter to search engines? No, because after all they are bots and bots can only read the link language.
Link Building play the most important roll in Off-page.
If you get the quality link backs to your websites means your site will going to popular. Each quality link back treat as a quality vote for you website. if you get more votes then Google will give better rankings in SERP’s.
I’ve recently been to a big SEO conference and have some solid information about this field which I will detail here for anyone that is interested.
There are some bad replies to this post with, what I believe to be, incorrect information.
This information is my opinion after learning everything I have.
We have since stopped using the company. As of now, the links still exist.
We have come to the conclusion, that at best, the existing links are doing nothing for us. At worst, they are hurting us a bit, but not to any great extent (otherwise we would’ve been notified in Google Analytics).
It has been stressed to me over and over again by some high profile experts that link building, as we know it, should not be performed.
Links are important, but they are only important if the links are actually used by real people. We have completely stopped trying to get links from people. We are going to put all our effort and time into building unique, interesting content that people will want to read. Interesting content should generate natural links without any work from us in getting that link. Good content should also generate links and like in social media applications, generating further traffic for us.
In summary:
No manual link building.
Good quality, unique content.
Links will build themselves.
Link building is maybe not a strategy for big sites with a lot of content. But what about small pages and blogs. Do still backlinks work?
I have a small page and can never be a competition to big authority pages. How can I achieve good ranking in google? Still some pages of poor quality are high ranked, how is it possible?