Five Link Building Tactics Car Dealers Should Steer Clear Of

Links are one of the biggest search engine ranking factors, and if you want to start bumping up your car dealer website’s position in Google, you need to be creating them! While link building is highly effective, if you don’t do it right, you could do more damage than good, so here are five things to avoid.

Link building is a highly effective SEO tactic used to increase your website’s domain authority, which, in turn, will improve your position in search engine rankings. For years, people have come up with new, illegitimate ways to create backlinks, but search engines have been continuously updating their algorithms to ensure that websites using these methods do not prevail. So, if you decide to use link building to optimise your website, here are some things to avoid.

Sending Content to Low-Quality Press Sites

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advising against occasionally creating your own content to submit to press release sites, but, some sites are better than others. Free press release sites hold far less value than authoritative press release sites, and if you want your link-building efforts to be worthwhile, you need to distribute your content to the latter.

Concealing Links

Hiding links on a website by making the font colour the same as the page background used to be a popular SEO tactic, and while this may sound like a smart idea, Google is smarter! This strategy is outdated and will not work anymore.

Trading Links

Link exchanges are risky and you should be very wary of them. They involve agreeing to link to a website as long as that site provides a link to yours, but if you are not careful, this could have a harmful effect on your search engine ranking. Before agreeing to a link exchange, there are two things you need to check: the site’s domain authority and relevancy.

If the site you are considering trading links with has a low domain authority, it is unlikely to have a significantly positive impact and if the site is irrelevant to your own, search engines will see this as unnatural, which could be damaging. If you are unsure about the website’s performance and relevancy, it is best to avoid the exchange altogether.

Forums and Blog Comments

Have you ever been on a forum or in the comment section of a blog and seen someone post a comment with a link in that doesn’t really make sense or seems completely irrelevant to the topic being discussed? This is a link-building tactic, and one that is no longer effective. Even if webmasters do not delete the comments, blog and forum links have been massively devalued by Google.

Rushing

Link-building is an extremely effective SEO tactic, but due to the increasing intelligence of search engines, it is not a quick one. If your website has never had any backlinks and then suddenly, you acquire a bucket load overnight, Google is going to assume you are spamming and you may be penalised. You must build your backlinks at a gradual pace; unfortunately, there are no shortcuts!

To find out more about link building and our in-house automotive SEO services, email marketing@clickdealer.co.uk, call us on 01782 904 715 or alternatively, you can message us via our contact page.