You likely know by now that SEO, or search engine optimization, requires significant dedication and commitment. While you may be familiar with some aspects of the practice, you may not know all the details. And in this case, the details are very important. They will take you from a moderately successful campaign to a very successful one. They will also prevent you from encountering problems with search engines when they change their algorithms.
Link schemes are something that people used to do with great abundance as a part of SEO optimization. It was just the way to go. However, search engines like Google will now punish you for doing it, which could knock your site back down to the bottom of search engine rankings. That would mean all your hard work building up an SEO campaign would go out the window.
So, what is a link scheme exactly? Well, normally a search engine evaluates the links that point toward your website. These links indicate what your site is about and how popular it is. A link scheme occurs when you’ve done something to manipulate the links that point to your site in some way. This can manifest itself in many different ways and can seriously injure your site’s rank.
A few examples that you’ll want to avoid for SEO optimization include buying links. This could mean exchanging money for links, goods, services, or what have you. It could also mean exchanging blog posts filled with links as well. Link exchanges are another red flag to search engines. This occurs when people link to each other and it’s completely mutual. This can seem a bit too targeted and may punish your site. Having links from sites with poor reputations or linking to such sites can be negative as well. There are programs you can use to automate the link building process. This is also a violation.
Some other things you should avoid when building a SEO optimization plan is putting links all over content for no reason, directory pages, widgets with text links, the same link used in the footer of a site over and over again, and optimized forum posts. Being careful is the best way to go in terms of preventing damage to your page rank due to poor link scheme practices. Make sure you’re following the latest protocols and making links in good faith. That’s all you really need to do to stay on the up and up.