The Dark Side of Link Building: What You Need To Know

As a website owner or digital marketer, you’ll know that building high-quality backlinks is non-negotiable when it comes to SEO. After all, building these linksHyperlinks, also known as links, are the connection points on a webpage that take you to other webpages. will help boost your site’s authority and increase your visibility in the SERPs (search engine results pages), which can only be a good thing. The problem with building these quality links? It takes a whole load of time and effort. Enter the dark side of link buildingLink building is a process of acquiring links pointing to your website. These links are obtained by creating content, participating in social media or commenting on other blogs.. A host of unsavory tactics – known as black hat link building – that promise to generate lots of links quickly with the sole aim of manipulating the rankings.

While building links fast might seem tempting, bad backlinks can be catastrophic for your website’s reputation and rankings. Want to know more? Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about link building’s dark side practices. Let’s get started!

Why Building Backlinks Is Important

As a quick refresher, backlinks are links from any third-party site to your website. If these links come from trusted, authoritative sources related to your industry, they act as tiny votes of confidence in the eyes of search engines, which can result in better visibility and rankings for you. If you adopt black hat link building techniques, however, you risk facing a penalty that could see your site banished from the SERPs.

Link Building: White Hat Versus Black Hat

When discussing any sort of link building, white hat and black hat are two terms that frequently get bounded around. To ensure your website’s SEO stays healthy, you need to know the difference between them.

White Hat Link Building

This is the type of link building you should be doing. White hat links are backlinks that are built in ways that conform to Google’s guidelines. They’re constructed organically and come from highly respected websites in your industry. When you create links the white hat way, you won’t fall foul of any penalties that could impact your SEO for the long term.

Read more: White Hat Links for SEO

Black Hat Link Building

Black hat link building is the opposite of white hat techniques. These bad backlinks are built using tactics that directly violate Google’s guidelines with the sole purpose of scoring highly in the SERPs. We’ll go into the various types of techniques to gain these toxic backlinks below, but they all share a common denominator: they allow you to build loads of links in a short space of time.

What Is A Toxic Backlink?

Toxic links built the black hat way can seriously jeopardize your website’s standing in search results. Too many links built over a short time and from spammy, low-value websites can signal to Google that your site is less than reputable. The result? You could find your links being ignored, devalued, or even worse, facing a bad backlinks penalty that could see you being removed from search results due to spammy practices.

The main black hat techniques that are used to manipulate the SERPs include:

• Private Blog Networks (PBNs)

These networks of websites exist only to link to other sites and boost their rankings. The people running these sites buy expired domains that have some existing authority and then recreate the domain and content. They’ll usually fill the website with low-quality content from content farms or AI to trick Google into thinking it is legit. In the short term, using PBNs can work to boost rankings, but Google will eventually find out, resulting in a backlinks blacklist, rendering your efforts pointless.

• Link Farms

What is link farming? Similar to PBNs, link farms are websites that exist only to create links to other sites. They don’t care about creating helpful content or providing value to the reader (both huge things for Google). The website owner sells links on the site to legitimate websites and lures them in with promises to transform rankings. If you’re caught using link farming to boost your backlink profile, Google will, at best, neutralize these links or, at worst, give you a manual penalty.

• Link Building Bots

Building links with bots will usually result in toxic backlinks. These are programs that create automatic backlinks in places like comments and forums. The links are generated quickly and can be flagged as spam in search engines.

• Exchanging Links

Link exchanges are when two sites link to each other purely for SEO purposes. Having too many of these types of reciprocal links can be a red flag for Google and potentially harm your rankings.

• Low-Quality Directories

Earning links to your website from legit, quality directories is a great method for white hat link building. However, getting links from poor-quality ones with little or no editorial standards can result in a bad user experience and toxic links.

• Negative SEO Attacks

Negative SEO is when a competitor tries to sabotage your SEO by building spammy links to your website in the hope that you don’t notice, but Google does. The good news is that Google recognizes these types of links and how they’re built, so they may not have a massively detrimental impact on your rankings. However, to be safe, it’s best to remove them.

What To Do If You’ve Got Bad Backlinks

Using white hat SEOWhite hat SEO is an ethical form of search engine optimization (SEO) which follows the guidelines and best practices for search engines to allow a website to rank higher in a search engine's results page. software or doing a backlink audit analysis can help you detect low-quality backlinks. If you spot links that could be harming your backlink profile, you should remove them. You can do this by:

• Contacting the referring domain to remove the link or add a nofollowThe nofollow attribute is an HTML tag that tells search engine crawlers not to follow a link. tag to it
• Disavow the link yourself

White Hat Link Building Is The Way To Go

If a website’s link building promises seem too good to be true or their site is packed full of unnatural, unfocused content, acquiring links from them is probably not worth your time.

Click Intelligence is the best white hat link building agency out there, and we use our expertise and relationships with real website owners through targeted blogger outreach to carry out excellent link building that helps our clients climb the SERPs the white hat way. We can handle all aspects of link building, from niche edits to white label link building, to help you build a diverse and authoritative backlink profile that Google can’t get enough of!

Get in touch with our friendly team today to find out what our link building services can do for your website!