healthy back link profileGetting links to your site isn’t a hard thing to do, but making sure those links actually help you with your goals is a whole other story. In the past, people were able to use strategies that allowed them to come up with large amounts of backlinks to help with their rankings. They wouldn’t need to worry about Page Rank, relevancy, and they would even use spam methods.

Well, as most of us know, SEO is always changing. This means that successful strategies also have to evolve to keep up with the algorithms that major search engines use. Nowadays, you can’t use the same old backlink strategies because they can actually hurt your rankings. With Google’s latest updates, they have been trying to counteract all of the black hat techniques and bad SEO methods. So naturally they no longer reward people for using spam methods, back linking to irrelevant sites, and also take into consideration the Page Rank of the site that are linked to you.

So if you are wondering how to make sure you have a healthy link profile, take a look at these 5 tips that will definitely help you out.

Stay Away From Low Quality Sites

Being associated with a lot of low quality sites will not look good in the eyes of Google or any other major search engine. It make sense, if you are linked to a bunch of sites that have low Page Ranks, low traffic, and are known to use bad techniques, then Google will assume that you should be ranked the same. The best thing you can do for your link profile is to always try and target the highest quality backlinks possible. The higher the quality, the more effective they will be.

Don’t Use Pre-Made Networks

As a rule of thumb, when building links, stay away from any service with the word network in it. You may as well just replace the word network with link scheme. Today the term “network” is synonymous with “penalty”. Search engines, like people, are looking for content that is relevant and for a lack of a better term “share worthy”.  If you focus on building your brand and speaking to your audience, then you will be much better off than trying to buy links in bulk.

Remove Any Bad Links You Currently Have

Purging your current link profile of any bad links will dramatically help your rankings. A lot of webmasters will go extended periods of time without checking their links, which can lead to disaster. Overtime, links might get broken, websites will drop in rankings, and you will be getting punished for them. The longer you wait to keep up with your link profile, the harder and more time it is going to take to have them all removed. To have them removed, you should contact the website owner and ask that they remove the link. You may find this tedious and all too often ineffective.  If they refuse or don’t respond, a great tool in Christopher Cemper’s Link Detox tool, which will allow you to very quickly collate and organize your back links by quality. You can then use Google’s disavow tool to have the links removed from your profile.

Keep To Relevant Sites

As I previous stated, people used to be able to post their link on any type of site and get credit for it. Now, Google looks at how relevant the site is to the link. For example, if you have a website about video games, you have no business being linked to a website about fashion models. They are 2 completely different things. If you do this, Google notices and won’t give you credit for the link and might even lower your rankings because of it.

Avoid Anything That Would Be Considered Spam

This might be a bit obvious, but it is well worth mentioning. Spam methods no longer work at all. If something seems like it could be considered spam, stay away from it! One thing major search engines are trying to get rid of is the amount of spam that people have to deal with. Just because you are posting your link multiple times in the same area doesn’t make them more effective. The more natural your links are, the more effective they will be.

Following these 5 tips should get you headed in the right direction. Once you have the best link profile possible, you will notice a dramatic increase in your rankings as well as your traffic.