I have seen time and time again an SEO firm or Guru that props up client sites with massive amounts of “rented” links, usually from blog link farms. If your site doesn’t get penalized you will probably get sick of the lack of results soon enough. When you pull the plug on the scam SEO company they usually remove all the links pointing to your site and further damage it. Keep your eyes open for a big increase in ranking followed by a medium size drop within about two weeks.

Now that you have wised up a bit you have a few big problems

First is your ratio of blog roll links to all other types of links are way out of whack. This is easy for Google and Bing to track. They could be in the form of site-wide sidebar links or footer links. You can tell a spam link from a good one just by looking at the other outbound links on the page. If they are linking to multiple commercial domains it is highly likely they are renting out those links. Avoid those types of links like the plague. If you have an SEO ask for link building reports and manually check where the links are coming from.

Natural vs. Unnatural Link Building Graph

The next problem you are going to have is ‘link churn’

The ratio of links you obtain compared to links that disappear is important. Now that the so called SEO Guru removed all their link farm spam it looks like you have a massively abnormal rate of link churn. If sites are un-linking to you that is a quality signal. The search engines may make you work twice as hard to build up a good link profile before they give you the credit you are looking for.

Problematic Link Churn Issues

Easy way to get local GEO based rankings

For a small business you can typically do well with doing just a few things. 1.) Register your business on every free business directory you can find and provide your website link in the appropriate spot. Example: Superpages, YellowPages, CitySearch, Yelp, Yahoo Local, Google LBC, etc. 2.) Blog once a week on something industry related. Put a keyword link in that article pointing to the page you have on your site you want ranked. 3.) Go on other websites that have news articles, on the same topic you just blogged about, and join the conversation. When the opportunity comes up to mention the points you made in your article, that add to the conversation on that other website, feel free to link to your article. FYI: If you don’t make an intelligent comment then your link probably won’t get approved. 4.) If you have friends or acquaintances in the industry try to get them to post one of your articles on their site or blog. If you don’t, try to make some new friends. 😉 Make sure you write something different but on the same topic. Put one link in the guest blog post pointing back to your original article with the keywords you were focusing on for that article as the click-able text for the link.

About The Author: Artificial Brillance

David Johnston, CEO has a background beginning in local business marketing and customer retention. After taking on high competition projects over the years David has gained experience and insight into the deeper things of ranking algorithms. David has learned how to use Social Media and traditional marketing to get top rankings for clients with Google, Yahoo and Bing.