Google’s Penalties for Link Building SEO Scams

Every day I see new ‘SEO Experts’ who claim to achieve success through link building. Link building is a genuine strategy when creating helpful, informative, expert-level content and outreaching, but many of these experts aren’t doing that. Instead, they’re paying for a website to be linked to on another website as a lazy trick to try to game the system and improve rankings.

Why do SEO Scams exist?

As with any scam, as long as there are people falling for it, there will be people trying to scam. People are passionate about their businesses, so when someone comes along promising all kinds of success, it’s easy to get roped in.

And sometimes it works… for a time.

The danger

There is some truth in the scam, which is what makes it so dangerous. Sometimes, the scammer is able to successfully improve the authority of your website. That’s because their sites have been created specifically as an authority farm, called Private Blog Networks (PBNs), tricking Google and manipulating the search algorithms in their favour.
They sell links on these PBNs, promising link equity, while violating Google’s spam policies for search: Google deems paid links to be spam.

And if they trick Google, they can trick you too.
Then a Google Core Update comes out. And your traffic plummets.

Google catches on to the dodgy tactic. All that ‘authority’ is pulled out from underneath like a tablecloth, leaving your business (or table, in this analogy) bare and exposed. That post or link you paid for is now worthless, and their site has been deemed spam. If you’re unlucky, or have paid for a lot of links, Google may penalise your site and serve you a Manual Action, meaning your website isn’t compliant with their spam policies.

The scammer laughs happily to the bank as their mission is complete.
If you caught on to their scam, they move on to the next person, finding a new way to trick and deceive their way to ‘success’.
If you don’t catch on, they keep you roped in with a new promise of traffic, conversions, whatever it may be to string you along.
All that effort, completely misguided.

If only the scammers spent their time doing proper SEO tactics instead of cheap tricks and facades. Ah well.

If you’ve been a victim of a scam like this, then you’ll know how frustrating it can be. I’m sure it left a sour taste in your mouth about SEO, and you’re on high alert whenever someone mentions it.

Doing SEO properly

Now, if you want to do some serious SEO, with data-backed strategies, quality content & articles made for your audience, and a genuine person behind the whole ordeal, please get in touch and we can turn the whole operation around. And get you a nice new tablecloth.

I can’t promise you a rank one position, traffic, or sales. Anyone that does is ignorant or lying – SEO doesn’t come with a guarantee of results.

But I can promise I will do things the right way, using tried and tested methods, and work with the same passion and veracity for your business as you do (and almost certainly dominate the rankings along the way). We can help if you’re a small business looking for SEO services, or a large enterprise business in a competitive landscape, or anything in between.