It’s an SEO Catch-22. You need a powerful, varied link profile to help boost the organic value of your website, but at the same time, if you build (or earn) too many of the WRONG links you actually cut your SEO program off at the knees and could inadvertently harm your website. So even while you’re scouring the web for the best possible links, you have to be watching your back and making sure that you aren’t naturally earning links that could hurt more than they help. Remember, you can’t control who links to you so even if you adhere to a 100% white hat approach to link building, shoddy links can still appear in your link profile. No matter who created those links (including if someone was trying to sabotaged your site), you are still responsible for them!

1. YOU CAN’T CONTROL WHO LINKS TO YOU
Written by Nick Stamoulis
It’s an SEO Catch-22. You need a powerful, varied link profile to help boost the
organic value of your website, but at the same time, if you build (or earn) too
many of the WRONG links you actually cut your SEO program off at the knees
and could inadvertently harm your website. So even while you’re scouring the
web for the best possible links, you have to be watching your back and making
sure that you aren’t naturally earning links that could hurt more than they help.
Remember, you can’t control who links to you so even if you adhere to a 100%
white hat approach to link building, shoddy links can still appear in your link
profile. No matter who created those links (including if someone was trying to
sabotaged your site), you are still responsible for them!
One day I was running a link audit on our own profile, just to keep an eye on who
was linking to us naturally, and I found another SEO website that had copied a
service page from the Brick Marketing website word-for-word and posted it as
their own. The kicker? There was a link back to our management page, so this
company was claiming Nick Stamoulis as an employee of their own! They didn’t
even try to cover up the fact they had stolen our content; it was 100% copy-
paste. I sent an email to the webmaster pointing out A)they had copied our
content and B)they had left MY name in the text. The site owner emailed me
back and blamed the content writer he’d hired to update his site. He quickly
removed the content but it left me wondering, how on earth does a business
owner not realize that SOMEONE ELSES NAME IS ON HIS SITE! Even if he

2. didn’t know the content was stolen, clearly he didn’t bother reading it because
that is too big a mistake to miss.
We’ve also had issues were spam blogs took our blog’s RSS feed an autoposted
all our blogs. Any time those posts linked to each other it generated a link back to
our site and that could look unnatural to Google. Panda took article distribution
sites down, so having a ton of content on junk blogs could make you look bad,
even if you had NOTHING to do with that content being placed there. You can’t
control who is stealing your content, so make sure if you ever come across
something like this you email the site owner directly and make a note of the URL.
You can also report sites to Google that you feel are flagrantly violating the
Webmaster Guidelines. Please remember that typically you WANT people linking
to your content. That’s one of the inherent benefits of creating great content on a
regular basis; it earns your website some quality links from quality sources. But
with the good come the bad, which is why it’s so important you monitor your link
profile.
You can’t control who links to you, for better or worse. That’s why it’s so
important that any links you actively build be 100% in line with the Webmaster
Guidelines. So much is out of your hands, why would you stack the deck against
yourself?! We actually worked with a client whose former SEO company built
links that got them penalized by Google! The SEO consultant claimed he used
“proprietary link building practices” so the client had no right to know how he was
creating those links. First off, that’s a load of bull. There are no secrets to link
building that a client can’t know. Secondly, IT IS YOUR SITE! You have the right
to know and approve of every single thing your SEO partner is doing. Even
though it was an outside SEO vendor that built those links, because they pointed
to our clients’ site they were the ones stuck dealing with the penalty.
Read the full article here:
http://www.brickmarketing.com/blog/control-links