Link building: No Spamming Please

I get frustrated by irrelevant and/or curt replies. One time, I gave a very long and detailed message to  an employee outlining the tasks I had in mind for him, for the week. There were a lot of questions interspersed in that message for me to check if he really did get what I asked him to do. And voila, a day late later, he replied “Ok.” I didn’t blow a fuse but it was enough for me to know that he really wasn’t serious with what he was doing.

The same thing goes for blogs, forums, etc that you hope to get your links to. All clean, decent websites truly, deeply hate spam. It wastes space, gives junk information, may contain malicious backlinks that may not just harm you but even your visitors and makes the website look unattractive. So as much as possible, you do not want to be labeled as a spammer when submitting your links. Here are some tips on how to fill in comments or answers in blogs or forums:

1. Read the article. Do not just skim and make an answer kinda related to the post. Go over the article (not necessarily thoroughly) but enough for you to get the basic facts straight.
2. Search the web. If you don’t know the answer but it is a site relevant to your site, search the web and give an insightful answer. But no verbatim copying please.
3. Don’t post generic answers or comments. No “cool”, “great job” and other obviously recycled replies. You can post these of course at the end of your reply but let it not be your reply alone. These are the usual answers of spammers so websites find these suspicious and sometimes don’t give a second thought to disapproving comments like these.
4. Put in a valid email and URL. Fill in the fields properly.
5. Comment back. If somebody made a reply to your answer, try to go back to it and post a response to gain the trust of the website moderator.

Link building is not just about widening the scope of your site, its also about building rapport with sites relevant to yours. And just as in a friendship, you want to win the respect and trust of your neighbors. Being honest, ethical and not looking like a spammer would do just that.