I was doing some foundational linkbuilding for LynneClaire Lawn Care, checking out their competitors’ linkbuilding strategies, when I got a surprise.There on the search engine results page, directly below a site with 17 inlinks, was a site with over 44,000.
Frankly, I was a little surprised to see a local lawn care site with more than 44,000 links in the first place. This would mean that every man, woman, and child in town had given the company a link — an unlikely eventuality. Or possibly that this company had established itself as an authority on something, drawing links from sites nationwide or even globally.
In which case, I’d have expected to see them well before the site with 17 links.
In fact, there were a few paid directory links, a fair number of worthless free directory links and link swaps, and a bunch of links from comments at forums and sites which were mostly unrelated to lawn care.
This company put a lot of time into the effort to gain all those links — or they paid someone fairly incompetent to do so. Unfortunately, they’ve wasted their time or their money. A large number of poor-quality links will actually damage your position for search, as this example shows.
Do your linkbuilding or hire a linkbuilder, but be sure to do it right. It’s sad to see someone’s efforts be so unsuccessful.
Here are some posts on how to do effective linkbuilding:
- Commenting for Links
- Linkbuilding Strategies
- Building Links with Reviews
- Basic Linkbuilding
- Linkbuilding: not glamorous, but super effective
Leave a Reply