Link Building Myths
Posted by Mike | Filed under Link BuildingThere are some articles on the net that list some link building strategies which can negatively affect your search engine rankings. There are also people who tell webmasters that some inbound links can degrade your site’s value. In this post, you will be aware of some building myths and hopefully, you will know what to do and what not to do when developing links.
Link Building Myths
Backlinks from ‘bad sites’ can hurt your rankings. Nope, this is NOT true. If a ‘bad site’ is linking to a webmaster’s site, the normal reaction of that webmaster will usually be “Oh no, my rankings will drop!”. Well, it’s not like that. Those links will just not count, they won’t pull your rankings down. Otherwise, your competitors will just submit your link to some of those ‘bad sites’ to make your site’s ranking lower.
Spamming Wikipedia with your links will increase your PR. Hah, a lot of people are clueless about this. Some webmasters say that adding links to Wikipedia’s articles will increase your backlink count and PR, but that is not true. Wikipedia includes the “nofollow” attribute to links, thus the links that you add there will not be counted as inbound links. Wikipedia can send you some traffic though…
Any site with a high PR will increase your site’s PR and rankings. Oh no, not this one again. A lot of people believe this, but actually, links from some of those high PR sites will do NOTHING to your site’s rank.
Let’s say your site is about fruits. If you buy a link from a PR7 word cloud and the anchor text available is “msadhsw”, do you think your site’s rank for the term “fruit website” will be better? No way! The purpose of the link that you bought was not served. Congratulations, you just wasted some money.
Links from worthless high PR sites might increase your PR, but the PR juice that they will give will not last for long. Why? Because those sites are very low in high quality content! And because of that, the sites’ backlinks will decrease and their PR will drop!
When you want to buy links from high PR sites, always remember to check the quality and stability of the website. 
If you want to know more about links worthless high PR sites, check these articles out:
- Word Clouds: Don’t Click That ‘Buy’ Button!
- On a Link Buying Spree? Don’t Waste Your Money on These!
A directory with a high PR homepage will increase your site’s PR. This statement is a big LIE. Why? The homepage (with the high PR) is NOT where your link can be found! Where can you find your link? In the appropriate category! If a directory’s homepage is PR6 and its categories do not have any PR, your site will get any benefit from that directory (in terms of PageRank).
If you’re building links just to attain a high PR, check the PR of the category where you’re submitting your site (especially if the directory is a paid/premium directory).
That’s all for now. After reading this article, you should now be knowledgeable of the things that will do no harm to your site’s rankings. You should also be aware of things that will not affect your links in any way (I call them time wasters!). If you want some link development ideas, feel free to check The Big List of Link Building Tactics.
