 If you are crossing or overstepping those boundaries and you get caught, it's going to have an impact on your bottom line. Welcome to the We Are Slam Show where we share marketing agency insights, best practices, and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly. I'm the co-founder and chief strategist here at Slam Agency. And I built my first website in 1999. That was one year after Google launched. And all everyone can talk about was ranking in SEO. And so 99, 2000, 2001, it was all about how do I rank my websites in a way that get me to number one in the SERP? The SERP, S-E-R-P stands for Search Engine Results Page. How do I get to be the number one result on that page? Well, in today's show, I want to share with you a little bit about how not to get there. So search engine optimization is built on many factors. There's a lot that goes into the ranking algorithm. In fact, it's been said that the algorithm changes more than once a day. Google is always testing what works and what doesn't work in order to improve the quality of their search engine listings. Anytime a company or an individual does search engine optimizations, they are in effect trying to game the system. Regardless of how white or black hat their actions may be, their purpose is to artificially hop up the results. And in order to do that, they have to do what is called SEO, right? So think about it like this. The internet is a series, millions, hundreds of millions of computers. Anything that you go and see, any website that you click on exists on a server somewhere. Even all the stuff that's in the cloud exists technically on servers that are on the ground. Okay. And what this means is that in order to go from one server or one computer to the other, there's a way to do that. And that path is called a link. So if I click on a link from google.com, from my search engine results page, if I click on a link to my page, it's going to take me from Google servers to my website servers. And what search engines do is they spider the web with automated bots. These are bots that are just crawling and they're crawling all these different links. They click on a link, if you will, or they hop onto a link, and then they take that ride from that link to wherever it leads. And one of the signals that a search engine uses is they use the text that they see there on the link. The text might say slam agency. So the bot hops onto the slam agency link. It travels to the slam agency server where it sees the slam agency.com home page. And at that instant, it turns back around and it makes a note that that link which said slam agency took me to the slam agency page. And therefore I believe that this page is about slam agency. Now that's a simple way of explaining link building and the value of link building. This actually happens thousands and tens of thousands of times to determine what a web page might be about. And because this is so easily manipulated, Google over the years has integrated stricter and more stringent solutions in order to prevent what's called link building spam link spam. And so today I want to share with you what not to do when it comes to link building. Because if you do these things as a marketing director or as a marketing team, then you're almost guaranteed to be pinging Google in a way that says, hey, I'm out here doing things that I'm not supposed to be doing in order to artificially increase my rankings. And oh, because you've noticed, I'm going to get a penalty. Anytime you do any of this stuff, you're overstepping and you're entering into very dangerous territory. Because at the end of the day, if you do too much of this stuff, what's going to happen is Google is going to penalize you, which means that your site is not going to rank at all. You're going to get a penalty and your site's going to disappear, the revenue from your search engine optimization, the search engine linking, the revenue from where you previously placed will just disappear, it will dry up. Because at the end of the day, Google is where people are and Google makes the rules. So as a search engine optimization practitioner, as a marketing director, you have to follow the rules. Here they are. All right. So I'm going to give you the list, but Friday I have a disclaimer. Everything that I'm going to share with you at one point in time in the past was acceptable. It was something that we did to rank in the search engines. But then at some point it got abused. Google was like, I'm going to put a stop on this, and now it's no longer acceptable. It's no longer something that you should be doing if you value the longevity of your site in the search engines. And that's important to note. It's important to note because if you do a search for what works, or if you have somebody tell you, hey, this tactic works, and then you go search it, you're going to find a lot of content on the search engines about that tactic. And a lot of that content, if it's pretty dated, is probably going to say, hey, this works. My site got to number one and all this stuff. Always look at the date that was published. Search engines are changing their algorithm almost daily. In fact, multiple times a day. And what that means is that if you're not reading content number one, that is current, then it's probably outdated. And number two, if it's like this amazing tactic that had this amazing result, if you're reading it, I can guarantee you that Google has read it, and they've probably already locked that loophole or that tactic down. So the importance of good SEO, white hat SEO, is super valuable today. It's all about creating amazing content and being a community member on the web, which we talked about the things that you can do and should do last week. In last week's episode, this week, this is all about what not to do. The number one thing not to do is to ask for anchor text. Okay, now I talked about how a robot will crawl the link. And whatever the words are that are linked, typically it's underlined, it's in a blue font color, that's called the anchor text. Okay, don't ask for that anchor text to be anything. If you want to customize your anchor text, do that on your own site. But if you're building links offsite, don't ask for anchor text to be customized at all. Just leave it up to the site owner, let them figure out the best way to describe you. And even if they just put a click here, just let it be. The point is, you don't want to artificially spam your anchor text, meaning that you don't want to have too much anchor text, it's like weights. And if you have too much in any one direction, what's going to happen is you're going to ping Google and say that there's something artificial happening here, look into it. So the number one thing not to do is to request in any circumstance, anchor text. Number two, and I still see this happening a lot. And a lot of times it's just straight up spam. It doesn't even get through. Matter of fact, on Slam Agency, on our blog, we don't even allow this anymore. What is it? It's comments with links. So back in the day, you know, your user profile could say, you know, Tyler Kelly, and I leave a comment and that Tyler Kelly could actually be linked. And so what we could do back in the day was we could change that Tyler Kelly, that profile name to like Marketing Agency, St. Louis, and then you could go leave a bunch of comments on blogs. And that link would appear over and over again on these sites. And it would say Marketing Agency, St. Louis. Well, that worked many years ago. It's no longer acceptable and it no longer works because it's immediately discounted. So it's not worth your time. It's probably going to get you penalized. And it doesn't work. Number three, low quality directory links. Another way that we used to get links was to just spend a lot of time filling out forms on directories so that we could be linked in all these different ways. There's only a handful of directories anymore that are even worth it. And most of these are local SEO listings. We'll do a show on local SEO at some point in the future. But the point is, don't waste your time filling out forms, trying to get listed on local directories. Don't waste your time filling out forms, hours on end, trying to get listed in directories. Don't spend your time paying $35, $99, $299 to get listed on the directory. Those directories are spam, and they're not going to help you whatsoever. What will help you is a profile with a good rating on bbb.org. The Better Business Bureau is a reputable resource for the search engines to know which businesses are ethical and which ones aren't. So if you're not listed on bbb.org, be sure that you do. Go to bbb.org and apply for accreditation. And what that will allow you to do is to customize your profile page and throw a link in there. It's very valuable. Number four would be any sort of link exchange whatsoever. If I give you a link and you're going to give me a link, that's an automatic no-no. It's very easy as a search engine to tell that we traded links. That's called a link exchange. Don't do that. The search engines will spot that right off the bat. They'll discount it. If you do it too often, they might penalize you. So what did people do? You know, once this became not acceptable anymore, well, they began to build what was called link networks because it's so easy for me to see as a search engine the connection between my site and your site and our exchange of links. What people began to do was build link networks where I have hundreds of sites and they all somehow are linking to one another but never directly. Okay? And so these link networks were super popular, you know, about eight or nine years ago and they worked. They really increased the rankings and side note, sometimes they still work today, but it's super high risk, high reward. And as soon as you're called, your site's going to get banned. So guess what? If you're a marketing director working in the corporation, if you're a small business owner, you want to maintain your site for years to come, it's not the way to go. And finally, number five, the number five thing that you don't want to do when building links is to use automated tools. Okay? So automation is something that as an agency, we're exploring and we're trying to figure out how to use automation and how to use AI in a way that is human in a way that is not going to get you penalized in a way that makes sense, allows us to scale, allows us to do things faster with more effectiveness and higher quality, but then also we don't want to abuse automation. And in this SEO link building world, it is super easy to abuse automation. It's super easy just to go throw $100, you know, on your credit card for a service that will provide thousands of links. Guess what? It might get you a temporary increase in ranking, but it will definitely at some point get you in trouble with Google. Now, Google's not the law and so you are free to do things any way that you want to do things knowing that Google really is where everyone goes to discover and to search and to find the things that they need. And so if you are crossing or overstepping those boundaries and you get caught, it's going to have an impact on your bottom line as a business owner. It's going to have an impact probably on your job as a marketing director. And so these are things that you just don't want to do. Using automation in human ways is good. Using automation to hijack the search engines, not so good. You will get caught. And so what's the common thread with everything that we discussed today? Number one is in some cases, it works. In some cases, you're going to see a temporary increase in rankings. But then number two is that if you get caught, it's going to have a negative impact long term, a sustained negative impact on your website and on your ability to drive revenue from the web. So these are the things that you just don't want to do. These are the things that as a marketing director that I urge you to stay away from. If you've enjoyed today's show, let me know. I highly value your comments, your messages, your DMs, your emails. If you're watching, let me know. If you are listening on a podcast network, be sure to subscribe, rate or review. And if you came across this on IGTV or in social media, do me a favor, like and share. It's important that we get this content out to more and more people, to more and more marketing directors and founders and business owners. So you know what works, what doesn't work, what to do and what not to do in order to drive your business forward. Thank you for tuning in. I'll see you next week.