It’s easy to spot an SEO newbie building links on forums. Easy as seeing a girlfriend on her way to church. These are people who want to get into the search engine optimization industry but only have half the knowledge, if that.
The story is usually that person X wakes up one morning and decides to become an SEO expert. Browsing the internet reveals some tips that seem to be similar: SEO people build links for their clients and forums are a great place to do it. This is how another “Search Engine Optimization Guru” was born.
A scrabble around to find the first customer and then it’s off to the forums for a daily routine of link building. A few months later, nothing works and they wonder why not. Your client wonders why he ever parted with cash.
So what goes wrong?
How does forum link building work?
First the basics. Search engine crawlers like pages with a lot of original content that follows a particular topic because they can be clearly indexed with confidence. Good content also attracts natural links from others, which then ranks the page even higher.
A good conversation can make it to the top of the search results, which means that any links within the page also carry great weight. This is what attracts link building on forums.
Search Engine Optimizers either try to get a backlink on your comment or use a ‘signature’, a short line displayed after each comment they make and where they are allowed to place links, usually between two and four.
How to do forum link building correctly
Here’s what to avoid:
Short Content – If you reply short in a forum, you won’t be contributing to a text-rich page with original content and that’s what search engines look for. A classic example I see every day is the forum question “I want to be an SEO expert, any advice?” which is followed by a response “You need to build links, forums are good.” Short answers like these will not help the page achieve a strong ranking in the future because there is little original content, so the links will be of little value.
Duplicate content – In order to get a link, many SEO beginners will quote another comment in its entirety, then say something along the lines of “I totally agree with this”. By doing so, they created duplicate content on the page (which crawlers don’t like) and thus devalued your link anyway.
Non-topic links: Links in a signature should be relevant to the topic of the discussion. If the forum thread is about search engine optimization and the links in your signature are to “rubber boots” and “organic fruit juice”, you’re on your way to nowhere. Not only will your links be discounted, but the potential strength of the page will also be devalued.
How search engine crawlers read a forum page
Let’s put that together to understand how poor forum link building fails. Now imagine a search engine crawler or bot landing on an SEO forum page. This is how he thinks:
- Oh! Beautiful page on search engine optimization
- Hmm. There isn’t much text but I definitely get the point.
- Oh! One link to “rubber boots” and another to “organic fruit juice.” That has nothing to do with the conversation. Seems a bit spammy to me. I’ll ignore those links, but now I’m also suspicious of this page.
- What is this? Any duplicate content? I’m starting to get very suspicious now
- Well, I’ll put this in my index at position 40,000,000 for the search phrase “SEO”.
In short, forum link building can pack a punch in search engine optimization, but not when done by a novice.