Page 57 - The Dark Side of Back Link Building

THE DARK SIDE OF LINK BUILDING 57

Much like with the other strategies in this book, you’re unlikely to risk a manual

penalty unless you’re using this tactic at a scale where it comprises the majority
of your backlinks. However, if you allow guest posting on your website and end up
pointing a bunch of links out to other websites, you’re more likely to catch a

manual action.

Article marketing itself isn’t a bad thing. But done at scale with the sole intention of
acquiring many links, without regard for users, it’s asking for trouble.

Final Words, And How To Recover

From Bad Link Building Tactics

Listen, if you were genuinely mistaken, there’s no shame in having used shady tactics

in the past. SEO is an ever-evolving industry. If anything in this book caught you off
guard and you’re worried, first, I want to say:

It’s going to be okay.

You can turn things around, even if you’ve been hit by a manual penalty and
deindexed by Google.

Check out that article by Maddy Osman to check for a few more ways you might get a
penalty if you’re worried.

Remember that there is a big difference between a manual penalty and falling afoul of
search algorithms.

If you have a manual penalty, you’ll be notified in Google Search Console and need to
take specific steps to remove it.

If the algorithms have detected that you’re using shady tactics and decided to ignore

a bunch of your links, there’s no real “fix” other than abandoning the bad links and
creating new, good ones.