Since the first post about links I made covered mostly good places to get your links from, I thought I would write an article about where not to get them from. It’s better to know what you’re doing when link building, than to go without a plan, haphazardly leaving links back to your site on websites you find. This article is to help weed out the duds in your plan.

Stay away from online directories. I mentioned this in Link Building Strategies and Techniques for a reason. Cheesy paid directories might charge you $15 or $20 for you to get a site listed, and most of the time you won’t receive any traffic from these sites. This is because, let's face it, who uses directories to search anymore? Not many people.

Directories Are Dead

Forum spamming is a link building strategy I would stay away from. Don’t get me wrong, getting links from forums can be great for your site, but putting 25 links in your signature and posting all over the dead threads on the forum is a bad idea. You might spend 5 days posting all over one forum, and get 500 backlinks, only to see your account was removed from the forum days later.

When joining any forum, make a few posts first, without even creating a signature. Many forums won’t let you create a signature before you have contributed a certain number of posts anyway. Get a few posts anchored on the site, and then add your signature. Of course, always post things that are relevant! Try to find threads that you actually know something about, or take an interest in, and post in them. Posting on threads you know nothing about, or don’t care about can be boring, and will just bother the people that are communicating in the thread.

Link exchanges are horrible. They used to be more effective years ago, but as the search engine algorithms have evolved, reciprocal links are weighted less and less. Two or even three way link exchanges will just not work anymore.

However a link exchange can be effective if one of you has more than one site. If this situation exists, they can link to your site, and you can link to their other site, which is technically not reciprocal linking.