Page 40 - The Dark Side of Back Link Building

THE DARK SIDE OF LINK BUILDING 40

But I want to pause to remind you that engaging in any tactics that Google has
explicitly said it doesn’t like is just bad business. Many folks will say that if it works,

you can do it as long as you’re comfortable with the risk.

And that’s true. If you want to build a business model on that kind of risk, people
certainly have done it and still do it.

But, to be quite frank, it’s a stupid risk in SEO because the risk is always increasing.

Would you take a bet where the odds change after you put your money down?

When you engage in bad link tactics, you can’t properly prepare for the future risk you

expose your website to.

Remember the golden rules from the last chapter? We’re going to add one:

Golden Rule #4

Future-Proof Your SEO

Google releases algorithm updates all the time. None of us know what exactly goes
into them because they’re proprietary.

But you can be sure that if Google has stated it doesn’t like a type of link, it is
interested in getting better at detecting it.

So, don’t base your link-building decisions on what works today, and especially not
what worked in the past. Base them on the forward direction of search updates.

If you see reciprocal links in your link profile, don’t worry about them. Just don’t build
them to intentionally manipulate your rankings.