In the last lesson, I provided an overview of what defines a high quality link. In this lesson, I'm going to walk through in detail the Do's and Don'ts of links. In other words, some tactics you can pursue, as well as many you should avoid. The reason for avoiding these tactics is that search engines, like Google, implement penalties on sites that use them. In addition, Google has an algorithm that they call Penguin that automatically lowers ranking for sites that obtain many non-editorial links. In later lessons within this module, I'll show you the role that content marketing plays in getting you the types of links that search engines will love. So now I am going to start to walk through a number of tactics some of which are okay to do and some not so much. And one of those are press releases. And I'm talking about them here even though they are not that popular anymore, but it used to be a very popular SEO tactic to issue lots and lots of press releases with links back to your site, and hopefully those links would help you with your SEO value. Well, there actually is a useful way to use a press release and that is if you send it out on a wire service and a media person sees it and it causes them to call you or share it in social media or link to your content. That's great. There's nothing wrong with that. But what SEOs of yesteryear were doing is they were issuing press releases, putting them in the wire services and then stuffed within the press release were all these different links to content on their site. And if that's how you're trying to use a press release to get SEO value it doesn't work, so you should definitely avoid this tactic. Another thing to think about is infographics, these are very popular. Infographics can be really cool, you get a lot of the information on a single web page, it's highly graphical, it's easy to read. Helps you understand things very quickly. And there's nothing wrong with infographics, if they're accurate, relevant, and have high quality info. Turns out this is another tactic that many SEOs have abused, and this is a scenario where you shouldn't do infographics. Certainly don't want to do them if they're not accurate, not relevant and not high quality info. And you also have to be a little bit careful that if somebody is embedding your infographic on their site, that they're aware that you're getting a link back to your site and what they're linking to. These are things that search engines get very concerned about if you don't do it the right way. In fact, here is what Matt Cutts said in an interview he did with me back in 2012. I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the future we didn't start to discount infographic links. Think about that. So that's a statement from Google expressing their concern about how many people have been using infographics. Another thing to be careful about is widgets. Don't use these unless they're highly relevant. Now here's an interesting one, a Booze Death Calculator. How many shots of Scotch would it take to kill you? It's fun, right? It's funny, it's interesting. In some sense, a lot of people enjoyed it, so they threw it up on their website, but you see at the bottom there it says created by Bar Stools at the bottom. And, well, that's kind of edgy really. Because clearly this whole campaign has been created just to get these links out there with the phrase bar stools pointing to your webpage in it. And so the reason why you have to be concerned about this is the links may not be seen as valid citations by a search engine. So just be careful if you're going to try to use this kind of tactic. Another thing that you can do is syndicate your content if done right. Now you'll remember in one of the earlier courses that we had concerns about duplicate content. What I'm talking about syndication here is taking content on your site and publishing it on someone else's site. In principle, that's creating duplicate content. But, if you do it the right way, it's okay. And what I mean by that is if you publish that content on a third party site and it includes clear attribution back to your site, and I'll talk about that in a little bit more detail in a moment, that that can be very useful. I don't recommend that you do this on a large scale. But if you do it with sites that are higher authority than yours, then that actually can be seen as a useful endorsement of the content on your site. So, here's what I mean by situations where you don't want to syndicate content and that is if you can't get one of the following things to be done. First, if ideally they no-index the page on their site, what I mean is the site receiving the content, no-index is the page on their site. What that does is takes that page out of the Google index and the other search engine indices. And so the duplicate content problem is eliminated. Now, the site receiving the article from you might not want to do that, because they might actually want that content to rank in search engines themselves, and that's a concern but in any case, if you can get them to no-index it, it's good. The second thing that they might be willing to do is place a rel=canonical tag back to the original page on your site. That's also okay because it also addresses the duplicate content concern. However, it has the same problem as no-index. The third option, which is what more syndicating sites would be willing to do is to include a link from the duplicate page back to the original page on your site. That acts as a signal to the search engine that you're the original publisher. It's not as strong a signal as the rel=canonical that I mentioned in the prior point. So just be aware of that. One thing I want to emphasize though, do not let them link only to the homepage of your site. You do want them to link to the original page of the original article on your site. Okay, another thing that people have had in their mind in link building for a long time is that once I've gotten one link from a given site, it's no longer as valuable, or even particularly valuable, to get more links from one site. Well that story ended a long time ago and I want to explain it to you this way. Imagine I walked into the room and I told you that I just published and article in The New York Times. You're going to say wow that's great and you're probably going to be impressed, right? But imagine, that I instead told you that I was now publishing a column in The New York Times. That's probably going to impress you more. And keeping in mind that search engines want to value content the same way you do, they get this. So this idea that you should only get one link from a given site or a small number of links from a given site doesn't really work quite that way, anymore. So, I would actually urge you and will urge you, during this course to seek out columns on high-authority sites. Few more things that I'm going to breeze through here. There's a concept of a thing called Article Directories. These are sites where you just submit the article yourself to an article directory and boom it goes up there and it includes a link back to your site. This falls under the heading of voting for yourself. Doesn't work, so don't do it. Now mind you, web directories was another old popular SEO tactic and it used to be that people would get links from hundreds of directories and pay a little money to each one. $25 here, $50 there and I did this on large scale. Turns out that most of those links are junk. There's a few web directories that might have some value, these might. It's not even clear to me that they do but I'm pretty sure that these at least aren't harmful. And maybe one or two very specific to your industry. But any directory you go publish in has to be very high quality, and the one thing I want to urge you is if you spent more than an hour trying to get web directories to link to you, then you've spent too long already. Do a little bit, fine not a problem. One other thing I gotta clarify here. This is different than a business listing directory like YellowPages.com or superpages.com. That's not what I'm talking about here. I'm talking about directories that kind of list, or try to list all the best pages on the web. Another thing to do is to avoid countries where you don't do business. Doesn't make any sense for you to be getting links. So I'm not picking on Poland, Russia, Hungary, Pakistan, and India. I mean, there's plenty businesses in those locations where it makes sense for them to get links. But, I'm saying if you have a US based business then having links from these countries doesn't make sense. Obviously, if you're in India and do business only in India then you don't want to get links from a US based business. So, just think about this for how you go about this. This kind of falls under the heading of voting for yourself as well. There's lots of people who would go out, they would go under forums or blogs and actually start putting comments in there, including links back to their stuff. Now nearly all of that stuff has no follow attribute on it today, which means it passes no value. And even if you found one that had followed links, most likely Google is going to discount it anyway. If you have too many of these kinds of links, they're probably going to punish you. More practices to stay away from. Link exchanges, I already talked about that earlier. Badges and counters, that's like the widget things. Advertorials, where you're really kind of just selling your own stuff but including links back to you. That's kind of like a commercial and bookmarking sites where you just keeping bookmarks for your own stuff. Most of these stuff or all of these stuff really doesn't provide any SEO value. That doesn't mean you can't use them for other purposes for your business and it may make perfect sense. But don't use it for link building purposes, as it's not what Google wants you to do. Hopefully this'll give you a better idea as to what types of practices are okay and which ones are not. True content marketing leads you away from these types of practices, but in a highly commercial world it's natural to look for shortcuts and it's important to avoid the ones I spoke about in this lesson. Make sure to focus only on those types of tactics that search engines value. Google actively penalizes sites that use improper tactics. As you get deeper into this module, you'll see how focusing on building your reputation and visibility with content marketing is the safest, best approach to obtaining high quality links. We'll start that in the next lesson, in which I'll walk you through what guest posting is and the role it can play within your content marketing strategy.
