How to Combat Low Quality Back Links

The good folks over at the Google Webmaster Central Blog recently launched a post explaining how to identify low-quality links coming into your site and how you may be able to remove them.

In other words, a site that is either low authority or that has nothing to do with law or your geographic location links back to your website for whatever reason and you are sure that it's hurting your search engine rankings.

While Google downplays the importance of the authority of websites linking back to your website (or blog) which may not be 100% accurate, they are pretty correct in that all you can do in this case is e-mail the webmaster and ask them not to link back to your site.

This brings up an important point. A lot of times we'll have a client who had previously hired an SEO company or consultant to build back links to their website ask us to perform monthly link building services on their website. We'll go in and see what types of back links that the previous SEO'ers were able to obtain, and most of the time the results are astonishing.

We'll find links from sites offering anything from women's shoes to Viagra linking back to attorneys' websites, and the clients wonder why they're not ranking on page one and why their Google PageRank is so low.

If you hire an SEO company or consultant to perform search engine marketing, primarily link building, you need to know that they are using white-hat techniques and aren't going out and obtaining links from any website that they can find. Asking for a monthly report breaking down what links were obtained by the company or consultant usually helps you monitor the quality of their work, and always be sure to monitor your back links in Google Webmaster tools.

If you're performing link building on your own, always be sure to only obtain links that are relevant to your practice area or location.

It's very tempting to obtain "crap" links in order to boost your search engine rankings, especially if you see that your competition has done so and is now ranking better than you are, but in the long run quality over quantity will be the equation for your website's success on the search engines.