SEOno

The mighty Jon Cooper of Point Blank SEO fame recently published a sequel to his Creative Link Building post, the latter/original becoming the most popular article ever to be shared on Inbound.org to date.

Inspired by Jon’s posts, I had a light-bulb moment when chatting to good friend and fellow SEO Emma Barnes:

@ejbarnes89 You must’ve seen some crappy links in your time! Hey, now there’s a blog post idea: asking SEOs for the worst link they’ve seen.

— Steve Morgan (@steviephil) April 18, 2013

Instead of the best and/or most creative links SEOs had built, what about the worst they’d seen on their SEOing exploits around the Web, whether it be through link analysis or more randomly?

I decided to ask a number of SEOs in the industry about their experiences, horror stories and/or funny encounters. There were a few caveats though:

• No outing! All examples must be anonymous so as not to implicate anyone specifically.
• It didn’t necessarily have to be the spammiest link they’d seen – I was also looking for links that had been poorly executed, incorrectly implemented, etc.

When asking for contributions, a few people declined, feeling a little uncomfortable with getting involved. I could understand, given the nature of the content. However when I had the idea, I never saw it as this negative or hateful post, and so I’m hoping people will see it as a good teaching point – i.e. certainly how not to build links! – and also get a few chuckles out of it.

NOTE: Even with the above caveats, it goes without saying that some of the examples are NSFW, so be careful if you’re reading at work! (I’ve labelled the ones that this applies to.)

Ok, so I’ll kick things off…

Steve Morgan
@steviephil
SEOno.co.uk / boxuk.com

As many SEOs will know, you have some clients who don’t want to get involved with the SEO at all (they just want you to do it all for them), but there are those who like to get stuck in and involved as well. I once had a client while at a previous agency who wanted to help out. I won’t say what industry he was in – let’s just say it was household furniture. Anyway, we’d had discussions about our link building process before (e.g. keep it relevant, keep it high quality, etc.) and so I assumed he had a good idea about the good ways and bad ways to obtain links.

A little while later, he got back to me and told me that he’d just bought 100 links! I was concerned immediately. 100 links at once? Paid links?! I asked him for examples – and that’s when I started to panic. 20 of them were on ‘health’ sites (yep, you guessed it: the ‘v’ word)! The funniest was one that had a blogroll containing a dozen links: 11 of them had anchor text such as “buy [pill name]” and “[another pill name] 100 mg” and in the middle of them? One link all on its own, the odd-one-out, with the anchor text: “buy pine furniture”.

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