What Is A Link Scheme?

Link scheme also known as “link spam” is when you deliberately manipulate Google’s search algorithm by creating unnatural links.

These schemes try to artificially boost your website’s ranking through spammy links. This is a black hat SEO practice that violates Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and can get you penalized.

Link schemes include buying or selling links, excessive link exchanges, and using automated programs to create links.

Getting caught participating in link schemes can lead to severe penalties and in the worst cases…

Having your website completely deindexed from Google’s organic search results. It’s just not worth the risk!

That’s why building ONLY high-quality backlinks and using proven link building strategies is essential.

learn how to increase your search traffic in 28 days

Different Types Of Link Schemes

Here is a list of different types of link schemes:

- Buying or Selling Links: Includes exchanging money, goods, or services for backlinks.
- Excessive Link Exchanges: Making deals with other website owners to link to each other.
- Automated Programs: Using software and tools to automatically generate links.
- Low-Quality Directories: Submitting your site to directories without editorial standards just to get an inbound link.
- Requiring Links As Part Of A Service: This includes requiring links as part of contracts, service agreements and more.
- Over-Optimised Guest Posts: Writing guest posts and using keyword-rich anchor text unnaturally to place a link.
- Forums and Comments: Posting outbound links in forum and blog comments just to get a backlink
- PBNs: Building a personal blog network to create a linking system.

The thing to remember about link schemes is that they are always unnatural.

When you create a link as part of a link scheme, you are purposely doing an activity that creates an unnatural link just to boost SEO rankings.

This is where you can end up with trouble with Google.

Any quality link building activity aims to ensure that each link looks and feels completely natural.

That’s when link building can have a significant positive impact on our SEO!

Why Should You Avoid Link Schemes?

You should avoid link schemes because they can lead to severe penalties from search engines.

In the worst cases, your entire website can be removed from Google.

The truth is that Google’s algorithms are good at identifying link schemes.

In 2012, the Google Penguin update was released.

This huge update allowed Google to quickly identify websites participating in link schemes and penalise them.

It affected hundreds of thousands of websites overnight.

Google has only continued to improve their link spam algorithm.

There are two types of Google penalties:

Algorithmic Penalties: Google’s algorithm automatically identifies unnatural link activities and lowers your website’s rankings.
Manual Penalties: Your site receives a manual action from Google’s human web spam team.