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Does link building hurt search engine rankings?

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A common threat for every link builder during link building campaign is “Sudden drop in website rankings”. As most of the clients think that this occurs due to the inbound links that are developed by their link building service provider. This leads to a fear of campaign repudiation.

The intent of writing this post is to let people know the main reasons why website ranking drops and what could be the consequences if inbound links will hurt your rankings.

This is probably one of the frequently asked questions we come across. This is because as soon as people see the sudden drop in rankings, they start assuming right and wrong. We have compiled a list of reasons to prevent people by taking any wrong decision in haste. Which in turn result permanent loss of ranking?

Ranking can be affected by the site you link out –

You can’t stop other websites from linking to your website but your rankings can be affected by sites you link out to. Sometimes people sell their website space to irrelevant sites in order to make profit.

Competitor outranked your website –

One uncontrollable condition is when your competitor works consistently to outrank you. Sometimes, when our website ranks well we think that we have developed sufficient links. However in link building nothing is too much. It is an ongoing process. So, we need to add relevant inbound links to maintain those rankings.

Significant decrease in Link Popularity –

Another reason could be, one or more links to your site that had been passing a significant link juice to your website have been removed/deleted, moved to a new, unranked page, or the Page Rank of the originating website has dropped (for similar reasons). Websites with low to modest Page Rank often obtain the bulk of their link strength from a small number of potential back links. So the loss of even one of them can have a major impact on their rankings.

Search Engine Penalty –

1. Unethical on page optimization: Sometimes people optimize their sites by using unethical optimization techniques and achieve high rankings in short spam. However this ranking position does not last forever. You will be flying high one day and not to be seen next day. If Google considers that your website optimization is beyond acceptable limit , your website will be red-flagged and automatically restricted or penalized.
2. Excessive Reciprocal links: Google discourages the practice of exchanging links for ranking manipulation. No doubt, reciprocal link works and it can push your rankings upward. But you should limit link exchange to quality sites. Link exchange with irrelevant sites could be a bigger cause of your ranking downfall.

Server Migration Problem –

If Google has difficulty accessing your site, if it’s slow to respond or responds with an error code for a sustained period, it can lead to problems. Search engines are very tolerant of short periods when a site may be unavailable for maintenance or other issues, but if the problems persist over many days it can impact your rankings. If you know your site will be down for maintenance, you should set your server to respond with code 503, which informs the search engines that you’re aware of the situation and they should try again later.

If links are relevant and on quality sites there is no way they hurt rankings.

Site owners can not control who link to them.

You can control the outbound links from your site, but what about inbound links? They are, by their nature, supposed to be out of your control.

People can build links from spam pages for their competitors.

If your ranking could be hurt then all you have to do is get “bad links” for all your competitor’s sites and you would be on top.

According to Bing webmaster center “The truth is that getting bad links happens to great sites. We know this happens. In fact, we’ve never seen a decently ranking site that doesn’t have a few (or more) bad inbound links. We take the approach that bad inbound links won’t adversely affect your site ranking unless most or all of your inbound links are from bad sites.”

Conclusion: Inbound links never hurt rankings even if they are bad. Google can penalize your website only if majority of your website links coming from irrelevant websites or FFA (free for all) sites.

Now the bottom line is “Link building needs patience“. A link passes link juice only when Google crawl the linking page so we should not take immediate action (remove link) when our website ranking drops. Also, we must analyze all the activities to find out the real cause of ranking downfall, as one wrong step could ruin our website rankings permanently”.

PS: Do read our knowledge base to know more link building tips and techniques.