Nearly 2 years ago we did an experiment that shows where you build your links from and how quickly you build links will rank your website on Google. We used relevantlikbuilding.com as our test domain. We purchased the domain in June 2010 and built the website with all the on site SEO such as meta tags, descriptions, images etc. We started our link building campaign straight away.

The main keyword and the only keyword we wanted to optimise was ‘Link Building’. The goal for this experiment was to find out 1. What type of website Google pays most attention to from our backlinks and 2. Creating links on a brand new website too quickly will damage our rankings.

We built all of our links from link directories, article directories and blog comments. All of these websites have no relevance to our site and most of them all had duplicate content throughout their sites. We also used companies from India that offer 1000′s of backlinks for next to nothing and found a company on ebay that offered a link building service. As we mentioned in our previous blogs, link and article directories hold no weight with Google for backlinks, so we did this experiment show you.

In the first month we had ordered around 10,000 backlinks all for ‘Link Building’ from link directories and article directories etc. By the end of August we had roughly 8000 backlinks indexed with Google and our keyword ‘Link Building’ was on the bottom of the first page of Google. We ordered another set of these link and article backlinks and by August we had around 15,000 links picked up by Google all for ‘Link Building’ and relevantlinkbuilding.com was position 5 on the first page of Google. Sounds good? Keep on reading.

So, we have around 15,000 backlinks indexed with Google all for one keyword, ‘Link Building’ and holding a good position on Google for the keyword we wanted to be ranked for. Why are we ranked so high for a competitive keyword with a brand new website? Google have only picked up and indexAndre backlinks we have created, they have not looked in depth at the quality of the site the links are coming from yet, hence why the site is ranked high.

Going into December we started dropping rankings daily. Page 3,4,6….. Within a week of being on the 1st page for link building we have dropped down to page 10. By the end of December we could not even find our website listed in Google in the first 50 pages. This is because Google realised that all of our backlinks were from poor, unrelevant websites, eg, link/article directories, blog comments etc so the power of our backlinks were no where near strong enough to even get our website in the top 50 pages of results. Also we have built links far too quickly and only focused on one keyword ‘Link Building’ and did not support this keyword with quality supporting keywords such as ‘SEO Link Building’ and a few others.

This goes to show that link and article directories along with blog comments hold no weight with Google and your website may get ranked in the short term, it will certainly disappear in the long term as we have demonstrated. So do not waste your time or money with companies that build your links this way.

If this has happened to your website or you have a company creating these types of links for you now, do not worry. We will explain how to fix this problem as we have done with relevantlinkbuilding.com. If you search ‘link building’ in google.co.uk you will see our site in the top 3 positions. We have done this by removing as many of the backlinks from article directories and link directories as possible and adding high quality, relevant backlinks from real websites along with high quality supporting keywords. This does take time but the results are worth the wait. Our site is now receiving over 10,000 unique visits every month.

If your website has been spammed like this or this is happening to your site now, please do not worry. Give us a call and we can fix this for you with our Local SEO and National SEO Packages.