In this age of online reviews, your brand’s reputation is paramount.
Before visiting a business, 63.6% of consumers check out google reviews. I 35% of the people they ranked “brand trust” as one of the top reasons for choosing a retailer.
Since a bad review can cost you sales and a negative reputation can be disastrous, reputation management it has become an important part of every digital strategy.
But even if you do all the right things, promoting good reviews, responding to negative posts, and carefully monitoring your mentions, you can still hurt your reputation or even earn a bad one through a bad link.
And it’s not just people who can view you negatively: bad backlinks can also negatively affect your reputation with search engines.
But don’t worry, we’re here to help. In this piece, we’ll look at how bad link building can hurt your reputation and give you some ways to help keep yours pristine.
But first, let’s look at how external sources can affect your website’s authority and reputation.
How external links can positively affect your domain authority
You probably already understand the correlation between backlinks and search engine optimization. If not, or you need a little refresher, read this (but comes right back).
And one of the ways that external links affect your SEO strategy is through the effect they have on domain authority. This can be both positive and negative.
For example, if you have a lot of inbound links pointing to a page, it can increase PageRank.
Google may, in turn, take this as a sign that your content has good authority and will reflect this in your search engine rankings.
Quality links also increase your domain ranking. Google weights incoming links differently depending on the site they come from.
For example, an inbound link from a reputable government agency or university tells the search engine that your content is credible, which is reflected in your ranking.
Build Bad Reputation Through Link Building
Unfortunately, it’s not all sunshine, ice cream and dogs with backlinks. The wrong backlink can also negatively affect your ranking and reputation.
Let’s see how your link building campaign can negatively affect you or your customers.
1. Links to bad neighborhoods
We hear it again and again: Try not to get links in a bad neighborhood. It seems like it’s pretty easy to avoid bad neighborhoods when building links, but sometimes they’re unavoidable.
Take, for example, blog comments. Find a blog and enter your comment with a random website link. Everything is fine at the moment. But then come back to check your comment to see it followed by the next one.
If a potential customer came across these comments, they wouldn’t want to click on any link on the page, assuming it’s similar spam, including yours.
WordPress blog owners can go one step further. If they see a comment they consider spam, they can flag it as spam using spam filter programs. This will register the website URL in a database and prevent comments, including this URL, from being added to other WordPress blogs.
And this means that if a customer hires a service to build links, and that service gets the customer’s URL entered into the spam database, the customer will (usually unknowingly) be blocked from commenting.
Now imagine you find the perfect blog, which is seen by all the right people, and a well-placed comment could reap huge benefits for your business.
Only you can’t post a comment with your URL, which means you lose your chance, all because some spammer tagged it in your comment.
2. Being exposed as a link builder or using a spam agency
This notice is especially aimed at agencies that send bulk, non-personalized link requests.
Programs that make these types of link requests often send multiple requests for multiple clients to the same website owners.
Needless to say, if the website owner gets upset with them, they can do anything from adding their company information to a blog post (including the name of the link requester, the agency name and client name).
Annoyed webmasters can also report agencies to spam rejection lists.
Places like Domain Name System Blacklist or DNSBL, will list the agency and all clients linked to that agency. You don’t have to search far on their site to find a list of the most well-known agencies and clients that use them.
If your business is based on generating links for your client and you end up on one of these disavow lists, this is going to be problematic.
3. Misrepresentation of the customer
Alternatively, if an agency receives email from its client’s domain, that agency now represents it in any communication or request it makes.
Can you imagine if you were a website owner and you started getting spam for solicitations from your favorite company? Or if someone who appears to work for the company has spammed your blog? Your opinion of this brand would probably plummet, right?
4. Excess entries with submissions to the directory
Web directories can be beneficial to increase your search engine ranking.
They were more popular and impactful in SEO two decades ago, but still seem to be a small ranking factor, especially for local search.
And a good directory, usually industry specific, can be a good source of traffic and trust. But of course, not all directories are created equal.
And if we’re being honest, many of them, possibly even most, (at best) do nothing for your ranking and (at worst) actively hurt your ranking.
This is because many directories are filled with nothing but spam.
If you have submitted your site to appear on one of these spam sites, the search engines will devalue it.
Remember that thing about bad neighborhoods I talked about in the first point? This is another iteration.
5. Being a bad member of a community
Forums are a great place for people to discuss their interests and ideas online.
Facilitating conversation can also be a great way to attract attention and get clicks using a URL in your signature.
But there are many ways this can go south.
For example, if you join a forum and then post the same comment in every sub-forum in hopes of building positive links, generating clicks and building your reputation.
It won’t take long for the moderators to figure out what’s going on and label you as a spammer. And so, you have created negative links.
Damaging your reputation with search evaluators
So far, we’ve only mentioned how bad links can get you down in the search engines. But there’s another part of your website’s reputation to consider: the experience of real users, including Google search raters.
And one of the things they measure when evaluating your site’s EAT (expertise, trustworthiness and authority) is your external reputation.
To determine your website’s authority, these evaluators use a variety of third-party sources to monitor customer concerns and complaints.
Sites like Yelp, Amazon Customer Reviews, and Facebook Ratings and Reviews help them understand the typical customer experience.
And if they determine that your site has low authority, they may mark it as a low-quality return for a search query, even if Google’s algorithm has ranked you highly.
How to keep your reputation intact
Now that you know the dangers that low-quality backlinks can have on your reputation, how can you avoid getting a bad rep while link building?
Here are just a few simple suggestions:
Don’t take shortcuts
Link building takes work, and so does building your brand reputation.
Remember that many people’s first exposure to your brand will be when you show up in search engine results, and if you don’t show up, you don’t get any exposure.
So please don’t play fast and loose with your linking strategy.
Be thoughtful and intentional, and make sure you’re looking for high-quality backlinks, the kind that will help you rank in search rather than hurt them.
With a little care and effort, you can build the links you want and keep your reputation spotless.
More resources:
Featured Image: Song_about_summer/Shutterstock
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