Link Building: Which Risks are Worth It?

January 2, 2009 by Collin LaHay
Filed under: Link Building 

I always enjoy seeing the most blatant spam sites ranking for incredibly competitive terms. Many blackhat SEO’s have so many powerful links that they can register a free forum account and include a link to an affiliate offer in their profile and then build so many thousands of links that this little page ranks top 10 for a term that is super competitive.

I always enjoy going to Yahoo.com and typing link:spamdomain.com and looking at the top 50 or so links that these spammers receive. Generally, the spammers ranking for these terms just have scripts that spam tons of guestbooks, forums, blogs, and the such and they have no idea that there are a few REALLY powerful backlinks in their arsenal because all their links were generated automatically.

Well, my question for everyone today is whether or not the risk is worth the reward to use a grey/blackhat technique or researching powerful blackhat sites, and stealing the top 5 links that they have and point them to a whitehat site (which is a lot less risky in theory than duplicating the other 10,000 spammy links that will ultimately get the blackhat site banned in a few weeks).

While many of you who do not do blackhat SEO might not see the benefit in what I am talking about… so here is a freebie to get your brain going…

http://www.claims.indianrail.gov.in/claims/admin.Guestbook

Here is a PAGERANK 6 INDIAN GOVERNMENT SITE that you can build a FREE DOFOLLOW LINK to your website on. The majority of people who read this blog have never received a pagerank 6 link without paying for it, so imagine how much potential a free one has when someone gets the opportunity to visit it.

Now here lies my original question… which link building risks are worth it? There are 7000 links on that Pagerank 6 page, which ultimately lowers the link weight to all of the links, however a pagerank 6 government website still has an unseen amount of authority in the search engines, so it has to count for something, right?

Well, imagine if you had 30 of these (or better!) links… if you had thousands of GOOD whitehat links to your whitehat site, would these free links be worth getting, or do you think they have the potential of being reported as paid links or spam links by Google and getting your domain penalized? How would Google know the difference?

I do not have an answer myself, but of all the research I have done on these links, I can promise you that some have been more than tempting to add my link at times…

Would you add your links to these individual really strong pages and be surrounded by lots of blackhat spammer links, or would you prefer not to receive the super good link benefit and continue on your super long term whitehat link building campaign?

Feel free to add to the discussion by Sphinning this

Comments

21 Comments on Link Building: Which Risks are Worth It?

  1. Ash on Fri, 2nd Jan 2009 2:09 pm

    2. Personally no I wouldn’t, however I would look for guest books etc which have very little spam and submit my link.

  2. Ryan @ Linkbuildr on Fri, 2nd Jan 2009 3:46 pm

    3. Well I don’t think I would because I’d be wary of when Google puts the smack down on some of the sites. I know me and you are gaming for a handful of the same keywords and I’ve been decently frustrated with the top results. I’ve looked at their backlink profiles and it’s very annoying to see the junk that’s ranking them so well.

    I’m still inclined to go about it as I’ve been doing because we’ll both benefit in the long run(or so they say:)

    But if anyone wants a good lesson in link spamming just check out the results for any of the top products going around these days

    cialis
    acai berry
    etc etc

  3. Sacramento Weddings on Fri, 2nd Jan 2009 3:56 pm

    4. Me neither….I’d rather play conservatively. I value my site’s reputation and don’t do recips with link farms!

  4. Collin LaHay on Fri, 2nd Jan 2009 4:08 pm

    5. Oh yeah a few of the top results for our keywords are doing some shady stuff, however the PR5+ links I found are not from anything link building related, but rather niche sites like you mentioned with acai and such.

    You can REALLY find some insane links if you check out the SUPER COMPETITIVE “buy viagra” keyword that has been blackhat spammed for years on end by hundreds of professional blackhat webmasters.

  5. Dewaji SEO Test on Fri, 2nd Jan 2009 9:13 pm

    6. If I must play that way, I will not use my main domain. I rather choose my dummy, perhaps. :D

  6. JustinM on Fri, 2nd Jan 2009 10:58 pm

    7. I struggle with this question quite a bit as well. I usually end up throwing the link at one of my domains that I wouldn’t mind if it got banned. But if it’s a link from a website that’s very much related to my niche, I will definetly grab the link even for my white hat sites.

    As long as your growing link profile isn’t consistently spam you will be OK.

    The other key is to try to get the links early, before 10,000 spammers throw their viagra links on the page.

  7. Ryan @ Linkbuildr on Fri, 2nd Jan 2009 11:12 pm

    8. I’d also like to chime in with checking out link profiles for the folks competing in the “free credit report” niche…that’s got some interesting finds lol.

  8. Donny Gamble on Sat, 3rd Jan 2009 12:15 am

    9. I see all of the people who run blogs on link building responded to this post, so I feel that it is necessary to voice my opinion about this question. This is a very tough question because Google is always changing it’s algorithms so it is hard to tell what it is to have a good link or a bad. If Google knows that you have do-follow paid links they will punish you for it because Google wants you to focus on providing great content to their users instead of trying to make money off of them. If they see that you are getting links to fast, they will think that you are using some kind of automation system or blackhat tactic. They want you to build links up naturally over time.

  9. Jeanine on Sat, 3rd Jan 2009 1:56 am

    10. I am new to blogging so I’m still trying to understand this whole “link” thing. I saw software that gives hundreds of backlinks called outranksmart.com and I’d like to know your opinion about it. Is one of the black hat methods you were speaking of?

  10. Ryan @ Linkbuildr on Sun, 4th Jan 2009 5:10 pm

    11. My advice would be to stay away from any software that automates the link building process. I can’t imagine the methods used are anything but poor. Perhaps Collin would like to have a say about it as well.

    By the looks of the website for outranksmart.com I can easily tell it’s a waste of money. Anybody running sales pages like that are usually selling a product that is repacked free information.

  11. mrbleeu on Mon, 5th Jan 2009 2:30 am

    12. It’s right many bleckhat seo’s are working now a days. Thy uses many improper tip to get good page rank, but you know that it is not proper.

  12. Lance | Johnson on Mon, 5th Jan 2009 2:09 pm

    13. I probably wouldn’t. I’d love to still have my blogs around 1 or 2 years from now, so I’d also be wary of anything which might cause my blog to be flagged.

  13. Seo Algorithm on Tue, 6th Jan 2009 3:20 pm

    14. I really feel satisfy if I find any topic where I could learn something or if I could share something. Here is the topic I feel to share something more brief explanation on your questions.

    In general there are two types of requirements: Traffic or Rank. If we prefer getting traffic to a website, we could choose promoting a website by posting the link into all major social network and eventually you can get good rank if your posts have worth in them. We get disadvantage if our website is not much worth of what we promote in the community sites.

    In terms of Ranking algorithms major search engines says that quality backlinks(including links from .gov,.org) actually weighs. As there is a comment above, a link from a website with related category do no harm, unless if the site you are trying to link with has bad neighborhood.

    The above comment is the part of my experience on SEO.

    Thanks.

  14. Alex Alcyone on Sun, 11th Jan 2009 8:42 am

    15. I would no way drop a link on that page, it’s been spammed into infinity.

    It’s kinda crazy isn’t it, because despite everything, there they are… spam domains at the top of the rankings!

    Of course, no-one knows the algorithm exactly.

    But it seems like it would be a simple thing to do, for google to say, ok that page has a rank of 6, it’s a blog, divide the authority by the number of comments. In that case, Google effectively wipes out the authority that is passed to spammed comments, but must also be aware that the reputation of a .gov blog page should not be harmed by the links out from its comments. Whether or not this protection extends to blogs in general I don’t know.

    I can’t imagine that a comment on this page is going to have any value – even if it did no harm, which it might because your link is surrounded by all those “bad words”.

    I’m guessing the spam domains must rank by virtue of sheer link volume and power – but it strikes me that google could so easily “hand edit” those types of sites out of the index if they wanted to – and yet they don’t.

    I think the BH marketers must know something we don’t.

  15. BusinessX on Sun, 18th Jan 2009 6:33 am

    16. My answer would be that it depends on the site I am building links for. It if was for an affiliate offer/landing page, then yeah go for it. Especially if I was doing PPC with it anyway.

    However, if the site is a principal long-term blog/site of mine, no, I would not want to take the risk. The PR is too precious to put at risk.

    One thought how one could use a big pump in links to help in SERPs is for domain flipping. Pump the domain showing it is top ten for these keywords with thousands of backlinks, then sell it it at auction. Just hope the slap comes after the sale.

  16. Aggressive Dog Training on Mon, 26th Jan 2009 9:00 pm

    17. No, I would not risk my page rank. I’d rather build a solid foundation slowly, rather than build it rapidly on quicksand.

  17. Squidoo King on Sun, 15th Mar 2009 7:41 pm

    18. I thought this posts and the comments were very interesting. I was curious what would happen if I dropped a link on the page mentioned in this post. I took a Squidoo URL which had been ranking in the top 5 for a particular keyword for about 6 months. Since I never made a dime off this particular page I consider it a throw away. Anyway, I posted the link and then pinged it. Within 2 hours my Squidoo lens was gone in the rankings. Well, not in the top 100 results anyway. Hope this serves as a bit of a warning for some folks.

  18. woogley on Thu, 19th Mar 2009 4:30 pm

    19. ok, if i use this technique for 3 consecutive days would my site gain worth it pr and traffic? I want to try but i am thinking how will be the reputation of my site?

  19. danny on Mon, 22nd Jun 2009 12:04 am

    20. no. i wouldn’t risk my page this way. but will surely try this out with another smaller domain just to see if it really worth it. ill go for the super long term whitehat link building campaign :)

  20. kindle 2 on Mon, 6th Jul 2009 12:01 am

    21. I wouldn’t link to that site. There’s too many other ways to get links. Better to be safe than to take a chance on getting booted out of google.

  21. stranger on Sat, 11th Jul 2009 2:01 pm

    22. link building is essential to let a website be known ,but you got to do it slowly , or you can simply lose everything

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