Poor Backlinks Lead to Abysmal SEO
Most SEO companies will have you believing that backlinks are good for SEO.
The more backlinks, the better. Right?
They will sell you several backlinking packages, ranging from £40 for 10 citation links (a waste of time) to £4500 a month for backlinks from newspaper articles written by journalists who know the right editors.
Google would have you believe there is no need to build backlinks.
“The Internet will naturally link to you if you write brilliant content that creates wonderful infographics.”
The reality is that 95% of all backlinks are either bad for your SEO or ignored by Google. See why your site is not ranking.
Backlinks have a terrible name.
Backlink building is the brown paper bag of SEO. It is the black hat, insidious and underhand way of fooling Google into ranking a website.
Pre-hummingbird (one of Google’s updates) backlinks were all the rage. It was absurd. All you had to do was build as exact match anchor text as possible from as many websites as possible, and you would rank #1 in Google for your keywords.
The major problem was that Google could not get anyone selling back to admit they were doing that. However, they devised a cunning way of ensuring that the people who did buy backlinks admitted it and created a list of backlinks they had bought.
If it suspected foul play, Google did this by dropping a website from its index. It then sends the Webmaster or owner an email saying you have a Google penalty for unnatural backlinks to your website. Should you wish to be re-included into the index, list all the links you unnaturally added to your website (read purchased) and submit that list to Google as a disavow file.
The importance of backlinks in 2024
Now, most SEOs are much more tenuous about securing links for their clients. There is a belief that backlinks no longer count. However, since backlinks form the basis of the Google search engine, this is highly unlikely. (See the 2024 update).
So, faced with the dilemma of avoiding being penalised and dropped out of the index by buying spam me backlinks, what does the standard SEO or website owner do?
They often turn to cheap backlinking and purchase citation links or guest blog posts from India. (A citation link is simply a web directory link.)
Citation links do nothing for your SEO
- The reason is that the anchor text has already been used to link to your website. The citation link is either your website URL or the company’s name.
- The page it links to is the home page 99.9% of the time. Backlinks are used to pass link strength to a website to corroborate further with the service or product keywords the website is optimising for.
- Everyone, including their mother, knows the name of the website or business and, of course, the URL.
Google’s advice page on improving your local SEO listings does not mention citation links. Why? Because they are just the old directory links. The content is the same, the anchor text is the same, and the websites are just DIRECTORIES. Don’t believe us? Go to Fiverr and spend £5 on citation links, and what you will see happen in Google’s algorithm link cycle (90 days) is exactly nothing.
Google ignores up to 70% of backlinks that point to the home page
Hence, this type of link, sold as a citation or confirmation of the company’s name and address, is terrible for your SEO. It is also bad for your wallet and wastes time and money.
You may read about toxic backlinks. A toxic backlink is one that Google is forced to ignore. This may be an untrustworthy website. It may be that the link has been added to a page via computer or script. It is unlikely to be a link in an excellent editorial piece on a website you would be proud of for your brand to be associated with, like The Sunday Times.
A valuable and healthy (non-toxic) backlink considers the domain’s age, the quality and quantity of content, the number of websites that link to this domain, and their quality and quantity of content. It also considers the words around the anchor text used to link to the website and the anchor text itself.
This is why most purchased links fall into the category of either toxic or ignored.
This is why backlinks are bad for SEO. They will drop you out of Google if they are of sufficient toxicity. Either way, you have not improved your page ranking at all.
