Page 8 - The Dark Side of Back Link Building

THE DARK SIDE OF LINK BUILDING 8

It didn’t always matter how relevant the websites were to one another. The link was

what mattered, and almost anything went as far as acquiring links. It was a wild west,
and the fastest SEO on the draw could single-handedly change a search engine
results page (SERP).

Unfortunately, the unscrupulous nature of these tactics meant that Google’s search

results were becoming irrelevant and unhelpful to users.

Google answered with updates, first with Panda in 2011, targeting some of the

biggest “content farms” – or basically sites that people never read.

Then the Penguin update hit, which basically targeted entities that many sites hit
by the Panda update linked out to (and beyond). Many more spammy SEO tactics
were obliterated. The hits kept on coming, too, with tweaks to these updates and

subsequent algorithm changes focused on improving search quality.

The sheriff came to town, and to a degree, the “wild west” of SEO was history.

But, just like any history, the full story isn’t quite that cut and dry. Some of those
tactics kept going for a while, some remain in use today, and some old tactics aren’t

all black-hat.

Search evolves all the time. Google releases hundreds to thousands of updates in any
given year. Both white- and black-hat marketers discover new strategies all the time.

Today, SEO is a much more mature industry. But that doesn’t mean everything is
cut and dry. Those old tactics come around again. Sometimes, they’re reimagined in

interesting ways. Sometimes, they’re just rebranded spam and engaging in them is
asking for trouble.

The thing about black-hat tactics is that they sometimes work really well – that
is, until they don’t. When they stop working, they tend to implode. And when that
happens, you could be in for a lot of work undoing the damage.