The Senior Product Manager at Bing, Duane Forrester, recently published a blog post on the Bing Webmaster Blog. The post went over four different types of link building strategies which should be avoided. While the blog post titled, “How Not to Build Links” doesn’t really give too much new information to those experienced with SEO, it is good to see Bing starting to get more into the game of SEO advice. After all, aren’t we all just a little tired of hearing Matt Cutts talk about it all the time.
Forrester began the blog letting readers know that he wouldn’t be unveiling any trade secret on how many links are ideal, or where to get the best links. He explained that the ideal linking strategy will be different for every site, and webmasters should focus on providing users with a quality experience before even thinking about building links. He did go on to give the following four ways not to build links:
Blink Requests
Don’t send out bulk email requests to website owners asking for a link back to your site. Even the very small percentage of people who agree to put your link up on their page, aren’t going to have quality sites anyway. The best you can hope for with these types of requests is a few low quality back links, which won’t help your rankings anyway.
Blog/Forum Comments
This one might surprise a lot of people, but putting links in your signature on forums, or commenting on blogs just for the back link isn’t a good idea. The point of any posts on forums or blogs should be to build relationships with the site owners or other people in the community. The point of the link will be to hopefully get some traffic from the people visiting that page (which will ideally be in the same niche as your site). Using blog or forum commenting as an SEO strategy is ineffective and inefficient.
Link Injection
Link injection is a hacking technique where someone gains unauthorized access to a blog and injects links into the header, footer or the content. This is, of course, a terrible way to get links and will backfire in time.
Guest Blogging
Here’s another one which may surprise some people. Guest blogging is NOT intended to be a link building strategy. Link forum and blog commenting, the links you get from guest blogging are ideally going to bring in traffic from that site. It will also help you to build relationships and trust across the niche community. Any SEO benefits you get from it will be minimal, and not worth the effort. It is, however, worth it to guest blog on sites related to your niche, just for the targeted traffic you will receive.
