Links are the life blood of any website. They help people find your website and help tell the search engines that your website is popular and deserve to rank high in the search results. The more links your website have and the stronger those links are the more likely it is to reach the top of google. A link from a website that has a lot of links pointing to it is more worth than a link from a web page that has no links pointing towards it.
The importance of links means that you will have to reach out to find website that are willing to link to your website. The process of finding sites that are willing to links to yours is called link building. In this post we are going to look at different types of links that you should never get. They are not worth your time and might even hurt your chances to reach the top of the search engines.
Blog comments
Blog commenting is a very easy way to get links. All you have to do is leave a comment to get a link. This have caused blog commenting to be used a lot by spammers and blog comments carry very little value. It is very easy to build the links but it is still not worth the effort. Most links that you will get will be no follow and carry very little to no weight. The websites that allow their blog comments to carry weight will be popular among spammers and your link will be placed among tens or even hundreds of spam links. A bad neighborhood to be in.
If you find a strong page with no comments and a topic relevant to your website then you can consider leaving a comment.
Guestbooks
Some websites features guest book where you can leave a message for the owner and leave a link to your website. These where once very heavily spammed and the links from guest books have lost all value in the eyes of the search engines. Google have mostly stopped indexing these pages altogether. Having one or two will not hurt your website but it is also unlikely to help. Having a lot of them is likely to hurt your website.
It is not worth the time and the effort to build. It does not matter how fast and easy it is.
Forum profile links
This is another favorite among spammers that was rather effective for a while. Many forums and other websites allow you to register an account and give you a profile page. One that page you can include a link to your websites. These links did in the past often carry weight and spammers took full advantage of this. There where services that sold lists of websites where you could register and the websites on those list were hit with thousands of spam registrations. It did not take long for the websites to start adding no follow to these links nor did it take very long for the search engines to start discounting them. This is a useless technique with little to no value. Do not waster your time.
Forum signatures
This technique is a little better then the rests. It can still add some value if you register to forums that are relevant to your industry and only post valuable comments. Comments that are made to attract visitors not for link power. The day that you could spam thousands of different forums and see good results are long gone.
This technique takes a lot of time if done right and the returns are not worth the effort. I would avoid forum signature links but if you have a lot of time on your hand or if you are posting in the forums anyway then it can be worth using this technique to build links.
Article directories
Article directories where once a great way to get targeted links but the method has been abused just as many others. The value is now very low.
Directories
There are a few directories like BOTW that still carries weight and that can be valuable links to get but most directories are not worth your time or effort. This is true for both paid and free directories.