21 Link Building Ideas That Have Nothing To Do With Guest Posting by Erin Everhart

As an industry, I think we’ve gotten better at not relying completely on guest posting as the only way to get links. I think. At least, I sure hope we have.

Don’t get me wrong: Guest posting done correctly still works really well – note the emphasis on “done correctly.” I’m not recommending you remove it from your tactic list, but a little tactical diversity never hurt anyone.

Note: I’m keeping these high level and vague on purpose in order to inspire as many starter ideas as possible. I find this to be ideal for brainstorming. It’ll be up to you to take the ones you like, add your own twist, and flesh it out to make it work for your company. (C’mon, I can’t do all the work for you!)

PR Boilerplate. Press releases aren’t dead. Make sure you have an optimized boilerplate at the end of all of your news releases that talks about your company. It’s almost always included if/when your release gets picked up by another source.

Executive Bios. Make your executives available for interviews or Q&As with industry publications, and make sure all their standard bios have an optimized link.

Internal Linking. Don’t limit yourself just to external sources. Revise your internal linking strategy to make sure you’re giving Google all the right signals on what pages are most important.

Job/Internship Postings. Make sure any open positions you have live on your site, not just on Monster or Career Builder. Most colleges and high schools will link out to active listings, and you can refer traffic to your job posting from any of the listing sites.

Glossaries. Especially if you’re in a jargon-heavy industry, publish a glossary of terms or acronym list as a resource for others.

Reddit AMA. Especially if you’re in an interesting industry, participate in Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). You’ll get some great questions and start building a community of people. Then, compile the questions and answers in a blog post to share.

Crowdsourcing. Poll the experts in your industry and compile their thoughts about a recent news story or industry shift in a blog post of your own. You’re ego-baiting, and it’s likely they’ll do a quick write-up when they’re mentioned. If you’re asked to participate in a crowd-sourced article, always do it. You’ll get mentioned and a link.

Free-To-Use Images. If there’s one thing everyone needs, it’s copyright-free images. Create an image gallery that anyone can use as long as they attribute the source.

Chamber of Commerce. If you’re a local business, most chamber of commerce sites will include you in their business directory.

School Clubs. Volunteer to speak or help out at your local college or high school, especially if they have a student club that’s in your industry.

Work With Charities/Nonprofits. Especially with the holidays coming up, there are tons of opportunities for your company to give back to the community with a charity/nonprofit partnership. You can donate money or time to the cause – or, even better, co-host an event and help promote it. They’ll probably talk about and link back to you on their site. Make sure it’s something you have a passion for or something related to your industry. You’re not doing this for the link – you’re doing this to help a good cause.

Sponsor Events. The same tactic for charities but for events. Relevance is still critical here. Al’s Cigar Shop probably shouldn’t sponsoring the 5K Race to End Smoking. Don’t just give them money to sponsor – actually attend the event. Do a write-up of it afterward and ask the event to share it.

Contests/Giveaways. Pretty standard. Host a contest with a tasty prize and have people enter by writing on their blog why they should win.

Host Events/Meetups. Host an event or meetup. Invite influencers in your industry. Ask them to help spread the word. Most local newspapers or websites (like the chamber of commerce) have event and calendar listings that you can add to with a link back.

Broken Link Building. Still works, but refine your execution. No more “Dear Webmaster” email. Build the relationship. Position yourself as helping. Don’t necessarily ask for anything in return right away. Moz has the most comprehensive post on the best way to execute.

Testimonials. If you use a product or service (and really like said product or service), offer the company the ability for them to do a case study on you or if you can provide a testimonial on how much you like it. Again, make sure you actually A) use the product/service and B) really do vouch for it.

Data Insights. People love to link to anything rooted in data: “A new study found…” and “According to a recent survey…” are almost gold mines for content ideas and linkability because people want to report on findings. Use the data you already have, or ask your customers how they shop for your products.

User Research. Publish your own findings of any user research studies about how users shop/interact/buy within your industry. You can set up quick testing through UserTesting.com without a lot of cost.

A/B Testing. Did you make a change on your site that worked remarkably well? Tell people about it. If you use VWO or Optimizely, they frequently publish case studies of A/B tests that have worked well on their platform, so tell them about it and see if they’ll do a write up.

Keyword Research. Publish your keyword research for your industry in “Top Searched Terms For The Pretzel Industry.” It may seem counterproductive to be giving away keyword research to your competitors, but it’s not that hard to get anyway. This just puts in a readily available spot and provides an easy way for people to link to and share it.

Case Studies. Shoot, you don’t have to publish just digitally-driven things that you’ve done. Maybe you feng shui’d your cubicles or invoked Flannel Friday which increased morale 57%. If you’ve done something cool that others could mimic, write about it.

What are other some creative link building ideas you can think of that have nothing to do with guest blogging?

Courtesy of Search Engine Land

The 10 Worst Link Building Assumptions by Julie Joyce

Over the past few years, one of the biggest problems I’ve faced is educating clients about search marketing — about what’s reasonable to expect and what isn’t in the world of link building.

It can be difficult, especially in the winning-the-business stage, to admit that you can’t turn lead into gold, but being honest and clear with clients to set appropriate expectations can set you up for success in the longer term. If they’re the right client, they’ll be smart enough to understand.

When we started the company, we stayed quiet and let the clients dictate what we did for the most part, mainly because we didn’t yet have our footing. We’ve always discussed risk with our clients, but we didn’t advocate for all the things that make our jobs easier and make links work better for them.

Since then, we’ve gotten better about speaking up and advocating for everything from technical changes to better content. However, we still have a way to go, as we’re still facing some severely problematic assumptions about link building.

I’ll list them for you here, and you can share this list with your co-workers, bosses or clients. If you, or anyone you know, is operating under one of these dangerous assumptions, it’s past time to get educated.

1. I Can Tell You How Many Links It Will Take To Rank.

I can certainly guess (42, always), but that’s only after spending a lot of time doing analysis and research.

My problem with this assumption is that it sets the whole relationship up for failure from the beginning. I can’t predict algorithmic shifts or what your competitors are doing (or what you’re doing without telling me), so it’s irresponsible for me to pretend that I can, just to get your business.

2. I Can Tell You How Long It Will Take To Make You Rank.

I’ve seen some sites rank for whatever terms they want after we’ve been building links for a few weeks, and I’ve seen some that take months. That depends on a variety of factors so, again, it’s irresponsible to guess.

3. I Can Guarantee What Position You’ll Hit.

At least a dozen times over the years, potential clients have tried to figure out why I won’t guarantee certain rankings — because they’re spoken to several SEOs who will. (A guarantee like this is a warning sign of a questionable SEO.)

Perhaps I’d be more likely to consider this if I had full control of the online market environment; but even then, I think it’s crazy to guarantee a specific spot.

4. If Something Makes Me Rank In The Short Term But Is Risky, It’s Still Worth The Risk.

I guess that’s true if you like to churn and burn sites or rely on PPC. However, the many ways to rank quickly are the kind of methods that can easily come back to haunt you.

Obviously, my idea of risk and your idea of risk may be very different, but throwing 30 exact match anchor text links at a page just because you say that moved the page up three positions in the SERPs is just a bad idea.

5. Once We Get To Where We Want To Be, We Can Stop Doing Everything We’ve Been Doing And Let It Ride.

We’ve dealt with a few clients that stopped using our services when they were doing well. Then, when things started to go south again, they wanted to start back up again.

Even if you feel like resting, your competitors are probably still moving forward so, at some point, you’ll start to fall behind.

6. I Don’t Have The Knowledge To Be Able To Look At Your Backlinks And Figure Out All The Bad Things You’ve Done And Are Still Doing.

This isn’t usually a big problem with my contract clients, but it’s been an issue with some short-term consulting gigs.

It makes me feel like anything good that we do will get cancelled out by all the spam links that keep being built intentionally in an effort to rank well quickly.

7. You Won’t Have Problems If You Follow Google’s (Current) Guidelines.

Just because you follow their guidelines doesn’t mean that you won’t become a casualty of an algorithmic update, an accident, or simple poor rankings.

There are loads of people doing things the right way and their rankings are abysmal. That’s one reason that sites are so driven to take on massive risks. Following Google’s guidelines doesn’t guarantee online success, ever.

8. You Can’t Be Penalized (Whether Manually Or By An Algorithm Update) For All The Bad Stuff In Your Profile Even If It Was Done A Decade ago Or You Didn’t Know About It.

You don’t just get grandfathered into Google’s good graces because you’re an innocent or uneducated victim. They really don’t care.

Matt Cutts, Google’s Head of Webspam, Explains

9. Any Free Link Is A Good Link.

I used to believe this, wholeheartedly. Now? I’ve seen some vicious penalties on sites that never bought a single link, never did outreach to get links, and basically just got screwed by having linkable sites.

10. I Can Do This Well Without Your Input.

I can do it, yes, but I don’t know your product or service like you do, and having an inside perspective means that the work I do is much better.

Having you paying attention and catching my mistakes is particularly awesome because, again, I don’t know your business like you do and I might make an incorrect assumption.
What’s the solution to this? Continued advocacy and education, or is there something more? I’d love to hear what client assumptions you face, as well as how you handle them.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

A Step-By-Step Guide To Link Building For Boring Industries Or Products by Matthew Barby

Within the current search landscape, most search engine optimisation campaigns have become increasingly content-led. The majority of the campaigns that I work on revolve largely around the production and placement of high quality content on top-tier sites.
This approach to search engine optimisation is more akin to a typical PR campaign than a traditional SEO campaign — and the former, in my opinion, is the way that most digital agencies should be positioning themselves.

Yes, I’m gonna say it: content marketing is the way forward.

Now that I’ve got that buzzword out of my system, we can move on.

Creating truly engaging, fun, linkable content may not seem that daunting when you’re an exciting B2C company that has a quirky product behind it. Just look at the likes of Red Bull and their Stratos project or Oreo’s Daily Twist campaign. These were genius ideas that have already become iconic content marketing examples.

But it’s not always easy when you don’t have the kind of brand value or creative positioning that those companies have.

Around 90% of the companies that I work with operate within what you would typically classify as “boring” industries — I’m talking businesses that manufacture special valves to go within specific types of machinery.

There’s not the same kind of scope to do some of the more exciting product-related marketing activities, and these businesses are often incredibly brand-conscious. Plus, proposing to drop a bloke from space doesn’t always fill my clients with confidence in our work, let alone our sanity!
There is a solution, though — and it’s something that we’ve been executing to great effect for a number of our clients.

Positioning Your Clients As Thought Leaders

One of the approaches from which we’ve seen fantastic results involves positioning our clients as thought leaders within their fields. This works really well within B2B industries, especially when their product/service is very niche.

The idea behind the thought leadership is to develop some key members of staff within the organisation as experts within their field and have them featured across a number of top-tier publications (both online and offline), then use the reputation that we’ve built to bring in leads. This could be through search, social, offline or a number of other channels, but it all stems around the content we create.

Here’s a typical approach:

1. Identify key members within the organisation that we can run some thought leadership pieces around.
2. Develop the message and story that we’re looking to position around the individual that falls in line with the values of the brand.
3. Optimise their online presence to reflect the image that we’re trying to convey. This includes scripting their LinkedIn profiles, Twitter bios, etc. and ensuring that all of their online and offline presence falls in line with the message we’re conveying. In some cases there has been a personal blog set up for the individual to further amplify their image.
4. Identify the top-tier publications that we’re going to target in order to get some coverage for the individual and wider brand.
5. Develop a content roadmap that covers the major topics that we’re going to focus on and collate this against major industry topics, events and wider company news/campaigns.
6. Work on a reputation catalyst to give us some credibility when pitching to the top-tier publications. What I mean by this is that we look to get a profile piece on a respected industry publication so that we can use this as a catalyst for further placements in the future.
7. Identify industry influencers, journalists and major content producers so that we can work on building relationships with them.
8. Get to work!

As I mentioned, content is at the heart of all this. This is where we will develop in-depth white papers surrounding the latest topics within the industry and work on some more visually appealing content that will appeal to some of the publications we’re targeting.

(Click to enlarge.)

The above diagram is the general framework that we look at when generating new content to plug into any digital campaign. This could be something as simple as a text-based article, or something as complex as an interactive microsite with multimedia-rich content. The same principles apply.
So, let’s delve a bit deeper into each of the steps for building out a thought leadership campaign that delivers SEO results…

Step 1: Identifying The Thought Leaders

It doesn’t matter how big or how small your company is — thought leadership is about positioning your business in a way that allows you to be perceived exactly how you wish to be. With this in mind, it’s really important that the people within the business are brought to the front of the campaign.

When the emphasis is more product-focused, we’ll usually look to position one of the technical staff as a thought leader. This allows them, as the product specialist, to talk about the science behind the product (particularly relevant in more technical niches).
Alternatively, senior executives or directors are prime targets to position as thought leaders, and they’ll come with a fair amount of credibility when you’re approaching publications — even if they’re not known at all.

I’ve found that the best way to identify your thought leaders is to outline the key objectives for the campaign and align the skill-sets of each key stakeholder against them. For example, the objective could be to generate awareness for the technical superiority of a product, it could be to establish the brand’s CSR credentials, or it could be that the business needs a wider international feel. Each of these objectives could be aligned to a different person.

Step 2: Developing A Story

Strategic storytelling plays a huge part in the branding of most major companies. The majority of the well-recognised brands on the planet have clear messages and stories that run deep through the heart of their companies.

Look at Aston Martin, a heritage UK car manufacturer. Many people dream of one day owning an Aston Martin, and their brand always has classy, professional and suave content campaigns, playing on the link with the likes of James Bond to create this overwhelming sense of luxury.
Innocent Drinks are another of my personal favourites. The business entered a hugely competitive marketplace in which everyone said they would fail. The result was quite the opposite, and that was primarily due to the story that they had intertwined with their products.

It has become cool to drink Innocent Smoothies. They place a huge focus on environmental sustainability and go against the processes of many major corporations.
They talk in detail about their humble beginnings of selling their drinks at a music festival, asking people to let them know if they should continue the business by placing the empty bottle in either a bin labelled yes or a bin labelled no.

Every part of their marketing reflects their story in one way or another, appealing to the younger alternative market, and they do a huge amount of work with other companies targeting the same people.

The funny thing is that a lot of the anti-corporate crowd buying Innocent’s products don’t realise that they are actually owned by Coca Cola – this shows the power that their brand story has!
With this in mind, it’s important that you consider the story that you will be telling within your thought leadership content. Consistency is key, and it helps to drive everything forward as one if you have a clearly defined, over-arching message.

Step 3: Optimisation Of Their Online Presence

This is one of the most overlooked and important stages of campaigns like this.
If you’re going to be positioning someone as an expert in their field, the rest of their online presence needs to reflect this. The amount of work required will depend on the scale of the project, but we will usually do the following:

• Full optimisation of LinkedIn account, including photo, copywriting across profile information, updating of job title, seeding of recommendations and endorsements and updating of experience.
• Updating of Google+ account and setting up authorship across any existing content.
• Updating of Twitter profile, including profile image (must be consistent with other platforms), bio information and full analysis of existing content that’s been published. This way, we can delete any posts that may not convey the right message.
• Creation of a personal blog (we don’t always do this, but it’s a really great way to build authority around the individual that can turn into a valuable link building asset).

Step 4: Identification Of Top-Tier Publications

At the start of each campaign, we spend significant time analysing the content landscape within the client’s industry in order to highlight the top-tier placement locations that we’d love to secure. These should be niche-specific and don’t always need to just be online. Offline placements can help to build credibility around the brand and can often lead to further online opportunities — don’t think with a one-track mind around links here.

Alongside this, we’ll research into some of the key journalists covering topics within the niche and build profiles around them. This can include their social footprint, their contact information, who they write for and what types of content they tend to post. Using this information we can tailor content to align with them and dramatically increase placement rates.

This analysis will also look at coverage for the wider brand as well. If you want a more detailed analysis into how I identify top-tier targets and get content placed within them, check this post out.

Step 5: Develop A Content Roadmap

The development of the content roadmap is probably the most important stage of the campaign. This is where you need to identify content gaps within the niche and focus big pieces of content to surround them.
My latest post on Moz looks at how I use data scraping to analyse leading websites within the niche I’m working in to gather insights into the key components of successful content. Using this information, I’m able to get far greater return on investment.

My preference here is to develop a number of big ideas that can then have smaller pieces of content wrapped around them. For example, we could develop a new technical white paper and then create a number of articles off the back of it, published under the name of our expert to capitalise on the rush of content.

White papers are just one example, and probably a bad one. Just because your company operates within a technical niche, it doesn’t mean that your content has to conform to a certain format. Find an aspect of the story behind your brand that will allow you to open your content up to a wider audience but still remain consistent with the image you’re trying to achieve. This is a killer combination for links.

One of my favourite examples to show this in action is from TruckerClassifieds.com, a site devoted to truck driving jobs across the US. They found an angle when they created their Truckpocalypse infographic that has returned over 3,000 shares across social media and just over 700 links – not bad. If you’ve not seen this before then check it out because it’s great.

Another fantastic example is this infographic from TownCentreCarParks.com that centers on drunk driving. This is great for the brand and has also delivered some great results from a links/social share point of view, not to mention all the relevant traffic firing through to the site.

I’m not going to go into too much detail around the content creation process right now because that’s an article in itself, but one thing I would say here is to experiment with different formats, topics and approaches.

Here’s a great Excel template (.zip file) that you can download for documenting your content roadmap – I’m sure this will come in handy for a number of you (thanks to Pam Dyer for this one).
Another thing to remember with the content creation side of things, and this will really help when it comes to getting buy-in, is that a piece of content developed for online can actually be developed and used offline as a sales/marketing tool. A good example of this is with these interactive infographics from Animagraffs.

Step 6: Work On A Reputation Catalyst

A reputation catalyst is a term that I use for securing the placement of a piece of content that has the sole focus of boosting the credibility of the author. These reputation catalysts are essential for thought leadership campaigns.

There are a number of ways to go about securing a reputation catalyst, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Here are the usual routes that I explore:

Sponsored Post: A sponsored post is simply a paid-for piece of editorial. Any links within the post will be nofollow links, but that doesn’t matter. The core objective of having a piece placed under our expert’s name is so that we can use this as ammunition when contacting journalists in the future. This is what I was referring to when I was saying that you can’t approach these campaigns with a one-track mind focused on links.

Many top-tier publications will offer sponsored posts, but it will depend on the budget you have at your disposal as to which you can go with. Having a couple of placements can help out a lot at this stage.
The obvious advantage to this approach is that it can be done immediately, so you can crack on with the rest of the campaign.

Work With Top Authors: I wrote a post earlier this year that talked about identifying writers of top publications, building relationships with them and commissioning them to place content on top sites for you. This is a strategy that I’ve executed on a number of occasions with great success, and it can work well for acquiring a reputation catalyst.

The advantage here is that you’ll have built a relationship that you can utilise on an on-going basis, plus you’ll likely get some links out of it as well. The downside is that it takes a lot longer than something like a sponsored post.

Utilise Reactive PR Requests: Services like HARO and ResponseSource can be goldmines for PR opportunities. Journalists are always looking for input from experts so this can be a quick win for establishing a nice feature.

I talk about this process in a little more detail within my post surrounding link building in 2014 (about halfway through) so make sure you give it a read.

Step 7: Relationship Building

Now that the content production has begun, your expert’s online presence has been optimised and you’ve acquired an initial placement (reputation catalyst), it’s time to start building relationships that can help deliver links in the long term.

Within industries where social media is less widely adopted, relationship building can seem like it’s much more difficult. The reality is that there’s just less noise to compete against.

The main focus for me within campaigns like this is to develop relationships with three types of people: journalists (preferably freelance because they write for a number of publications, giving you more bang for your buck!), editors of niche-relevant publications and industry influencers. I’d strongly recommend using a PR database to help with this, especially when it comes to the more technical industries because it will save you a ton of time and money.

One thing to remember when you’re reaching out to journalists and editors is that you’ll often only have once chance to make an impression with them. Forget batch sending the same message to a database of contacts, as it’s not an effective strategy. The more refined and personalised you can be, the better. I’ve also found that it’s much more effective to create the content in advance and then pitch it to a journalist/editor rather than speculatively emailing to see if they’d like a guest post from you (…sigh).

You might find this guide on writing the perfect email pitch pretty useful when it comes to this.

Bringing It All Together

Thought leadership is a powerful way to deliver campaigns within industries that a lot of people will write-off as being boring or too technical. We’ve run SEO projects that have been delivered solely through this approach, but from my experience, this should be just one component of your overall approach.

The relationships that get built through developing really specific pieces of content and through establishing key members of an organisation as an expert within their field will help to produce organic mentions over time. These things don’t happen overnight, but if you’re looking for a link building strategy that focuses on building awareness for your brand, developing flagship content pieces that can also be used as sales tools, increasing the reputation of key members within your organisation, and driving the rest of your online and offline presence forward as one, then thought leadership may be for you.

TL;DR

• Just because an industry is deemed as boring by a lot of people doesn’t mean that everyone feels this way. This is an opportunity more than anything.
• Thought leadership is more than just guest blogging!
• Don’t approach campaigns like this with a one-track mind focused on links.
• Obtain a link catalyst to increase the effectiveness of your outreach campaigns going forward.

Opinions expressed in the article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.

Link Building: It’s Not What it Used to Be by Scott Gombar

Link Building

In my blog post about the 6 things to focus on as part of your internet marketing plan I talked about link building. This used to be as simple as adding as many links to as many resources as possible, no matter the quality of the site. It did not matter if the site was related to your site content. It did not matter if you spammed blogs with random, unrelated posts just to add your url to one more website. Today you have to be selective about who links back to your site. There can be severe ramifications for what Google determines to be spam, whether intentional or not. It’s not only important to ensure careful link building but also to check on those links from time to time to make sure they’re not hurting your search results. Fortunately there are tools that can help with managing your back links.

Six ways to build links back to your site.

Wikipedia lists six methods of building links back to your sites. Some of these methods are no longer recommended as noted.

1. Reciprocal Link-This is the act of placing a link on an associate or friends site and having them return the favor by placing a link back to your site. Google has stated that these types of links are no longer relevant as reciprocal links are not considered authoritative. In other words it does not truly indicate the popularity of the resource and therefore cannot be considered to be useful to someone searching for that item on the internet. It is important to note that you will not get penalized for this type of link building, but the search engines will not consider it when crawling the internet. Google does allow you to link up to 5 of your own sites. For example, I own techsrus.com and nxtlvlllc.com so I am able to link from one to the other without being penalized by Google. Again, it may not help your overall search results but if one of your sites receives significant traffic it could prove helpful to the other.
2. Resource Link-When someone is developing content and adds a link back to your site as a source for further information, or as an authority on the matter this is called a resource link. Resource links are probably the most important type of link you can have. Google and other major search engines see this as someone else telling the world that you are the expert on the subject. Google has gone on record as stating Quantity and Relevancy of the link will count towards your site rating.
3. Forum Signature Linking-This is as simple as it sounds. This is the act of including a link back to your site as part of your signature within a forum. Just make sure that the forum is related to the site you are linking back to or the search engines may see this as spamming.
4. Blog Comments-Search engines tend to ignore links in Blog Comments because most blogs add a no-follow property to the link. So while adding your link to a blog comment is not very useful for search engines, writing quality comments may result on clicks from readers of your comments. Speaking as someone who frequently reads blog posts that interest me, if a comment appeals to me I will click through to the writers site.
5. Directory Link Building-There are probably thousands of directories on the internet, but don’t waste your time adding your link to all of them. Many of them charge and will probably not help your search results. Two of the directories you will want to add to are dmoz.org and dir.yahoo.com. Note that Google shut their directory down about 2 years ago.
6. Social Bookmarking is when someone adds your link to their list of social bookmarks. The major search engines take these links into consideration when crawling the web as this effects the popularity of the site in their eyes. The bookmarks are stored publicly and have anchor text making it easier for search engines to read them. Of course you should add your website URL to your social media profiles as well, especially if you have a large following but don’t rely on this to help your search engine results.

Don’t do that
There are some things you will want to avoid, some of them mentioned in the six link types above. Matt Cutts (Google Chief Spam Engineer) has gone on record stating that spamming of any kind will negatively impact your search results. Updates to Google’s search algorithm combined with Google shutting down 2 link farms have proven that they are taking this very seriously.

1. Commenting on blog posts for the sake of adding a link back to your website. I see this all the time (mostly on Yahoo pages) and they not only get ignored by people reading the article or blog post but search engines, especially Google, will punish the site you are trying to link back to. As a rule I almost never add a link back to my site when commenting on a blog. If the reader wants to find my site it really is not hard to do. If you have set up your website and social media profiles properly then anyone trying to get more information will have little trouble finding your site.
2. Adding your site to all of those unheard of search engines, also known as submission sites. We have seen the advertising for getting your site on 100 search engines for $39. These search engines will hurt your search ranking as Google, Bing and Yahoo will most likely see them as spam.
3. Link rings…avoid these. These are groups that offer to place reciprocal links on their sites if you do the same, or if you pay them. The links will be irrelevant and will hurt your ranking.
4. Link Farms are sites that just have massive lists of links, often advertising themselves as submission sites or directory sites. Avoid these like the plagues as Google is actively searching them out and shutting them down.

How can I check my links?
Google offers a tool for free as part of their webmasters tool suite. The Disavow tool allows you to download all the links to your site, and then upload all the links you want to disavow. Google recommends this as a last result after trying to remove low quality or spammy links through all other methods first.

There are add-ons to browsers that you can use to check links as well. I have added SEOQuake to Chrome which allows me to see SEO statistics including links for any site I navigate to. This allows you to check your links and try to resolve bad links yourself before trying the disavow tool.
There are tons of other ways to checks using tools, toolbars and websites, many of which are free. If you use and SEO tools they likely have something similar built in to the tool.

Courtesy of Business 2 Community

Need help with YOUR Link Building? Contact us and visit: http://www.janetpennconsulting.com/link_building.html