I have been looking into ways to get links to my site, and discovered that there are a lot of forums I can join and post my link, and dofollow blogs I can make comments on.
I am a bit nervous though, as I am wondering if google has a way of identifying this type of activity as spam, which it is. But then I wonder, how does one get any volume of links? If you were to only get links which are legit, it would be severely limited in terms of numbers and time it would take to achieve them.
Anyway, I guess the main question is, does google see that you are creating all these links to random places, and then see what you are up to, and then penalize your site for it? Especially with the forums, if I sign up on a bunch of forums and just post my link without posting any other content?
Even where blogs and forums have “dofollow” links, there is virtually no benefit in bombing them with comments. First up, there will be squillions of other spammers doing the same, so you’ll be lucky if you get more than a single molecole of link juice for your own site. Second, many of these sites are going to be in “bad neighbourhoods”, the sort where you don’t want your site to associate, because Google will assume that if you’re getting most of your links from crap/dodgy sites then your site is probably crap/dodgy as well. Third, it’s spam, and your karma will plummet so low that you’re best hope for reincarnation is a cockroach, and even that’s optimistic.
Yes, it does take time to build up good links. But that’s the way to get to the top of search rankings. Google are not stupid, they can’t be easily gamed and beaten. If it was possible for any Joe Idiot to get to number 1 in Google by spamming every open forum around, Google would not be giving the great search results that it does, and it would be useless, nobody would use it.
Natural/organic links and editorial/webmaster links are worth a hell of a lot more than anything that can be spammed. Rather than wasting your time and everyone else’s on spamming, concentrate on making a site that people will want to visit, to bookmark, to link to - and then they will. Submit your site to high quality directories and related sites. Yes, it will take time, but that’s true of any long-term sustainable strategy for success.
I appreciate these sobering replies to my post. I had the feeling this was the case, but I just couldn’t imagine that people do it the long slow proper way. It just seems that everywhere I look I’m seeing advice that tells me how to get lots of links, but what you are saying makes much more sense to me, I just have to get to work finding sites that relate with mine, and start making real connections with them. I’ve done some of this, and yes it takes a lot more time, but I can see that it’s the only ‘real’ way to go, and thanks for the reminder of the bad karma. That speaks my language, I just need to remember and honor that.
What I would say is that it is not likely to hurt you assuming you don’t do anything extraordinarily spammy. That said, google has become especially good at determining links that were placed by people that wanted to link to your site, versus webmaster created links. So you still need to put more thought into how you can devise your pages so that people would find them so useful that they want to place a link to you. It’s not easy, but if you can find a way, that is what really gets you going strong.
even if you gather tons of links on those kind of sites… its not enough since it don’t gave much weight… and those site are going to recognize if you are abusing them and get ban before google will notice.
It works both ways, Anne. Sites where the admins and moderators are rigorous at preventing and deleting spam will be considered much more reputable than those where anything is allowed. But you’re absolutely right - anyone who is involved in a good online community has a responsibility to that community, because if people start to abuse the system and try to subvert it for their own personal goals rather than the benefit of everyone, it can go downhill very rapidly.
i think it will be hard for google or other search engines to caught up all the spammers. that’s why forums do have admins and blogs have owners to maintain the quality of their respective sites. it’s their job to control it.
but we, as link builders, seo doers and members of the forums, we have our own responsibility. if we have respect on someone’s property, we will not do something that will hurt the reputation of that site we are posting to.
I see your making blog commenting, but if you have a new site and start building backlinks quickly and most of them are spam comments then you will surely be penalized from google.
so if you want to make a high traffic site all you have to do is to to focus on what your optimal link targets are when doing blog commenting then you can also provide some materials like article or news regarding to the topic that’s already proven to be of interest to those readers with more reading of related content referenced in links to your content on your site.