subject: How To Spot Black Hat Links [print this page] Backlinks are the bread and butter of SEO and have a huge effect on your sites rankings within the Google search results, without them Google will see no "votes" for your website, and you simply will not rank for your chosen keywords.
Though we cannot just use any backlinks from any site, it does not work like this, we need links from authoritative and thematically relevant websites.
Running a link analysis tool on a site can reveal if there is poor link diversity (links from differing IP's).
Poor and deceitful SEO practices has been performed if, for example, there are 60 domains linking to a website, but only 15 unique IP counts (there should be, in theory, the same amount of IP's as there are root domains linking to a site), this means that of those 60, only 15 of them count as actual links.
Using link analysis software, you can notice that a lot of domains share the same IP address (along with the same link farm style pages) and bear no relevance to a site, nor pass any real equity. A website can even be penalised for this as Google sees this as cheating/spam/black hat.
Poor link building campaigns do not have enough diversity of anchor text or variation of hosting platforms (blogs/forums/directories etc), it looks too spam like and un-natural and therefore could again, be harmful to a site.
A good link building strategy will cover nearly all types of backlink platforms and have a natural footprint, velocity and variation of link building.
Using various platforms including article submissions, press releases, blog posts, etc, creates a natural link building pattern which will give search engines no reason to suspect your links are blackhat.
White hat link building campaigns can take a long time and prove expensive but, when done properly, it is the most effective way to achieve SEO results which remain for an extended period of time.
Employing a reputable SEO company with proven results for getting their clients to high ranking positions in Google using only ethical techniques will give you peace of mind that your website will not be dropped for black hat tricks.
If an SEO agency promises that they will get you to the top of search engine results for your chosen keywords within an extremely short period of time they are likely to be using black hat methodologies.
Only select agencies that you know use approved techniques otherwise you run the risk of damaging your website and your very own reputation.
