If You’re Still Busy Forum Link Building… WAIT & Read This!

Lately Google has started attacking foul link building methods like bulk blog commenting, trackback spamming, article marketing to some extent and some more unsafe link building methods. One of the most used foul link-building methods is forum link building. After the recent Google Panda updates and a few more updates in the Google algorithm to detect spam backlinks, some blogs who earlier used to rely on these unsafe link building methods have started losing their ranks in Google.

These link building methods no longer help you get the same results, but instead harm your blog and can even get it deindexed from Google and other search engines! Let’s be specific to forum link building in this post.

If you rely on forum link building to build a majority of links, I am sure you are aware of automatic forum profile creating, automatic forum posting tools which help you make thousands of forum profiles and thus get thousands of forum profile links within minutes without you having to even look at it! But do these links work?

Forum Link Building – Past

In the past, forum links were considered to be very good to improve the search engine rankings. There was a time when forum profile links were valued higher than some other form of link building methods.

All you had to do was to configure a software or a script, add your keywords and links and hit the start button. The software used to create profiles on many forums including some dofollow forums automatically, fill the captchas automatically, add your blog  links, make a few forum posts automatically and bump, your rank in Google improved!

Google simply could not track this until some time back and as a result the forum back-links were counted as any other back-links and did not affect the blog’s rankings negatively.

But that’s past and Google is smarter now!

Forum Link Building – Present

Google is no longer what it used to be a year or two back. Google is now aware of all the foul link-building methods, how people do it, etc. The search giant is now able to track these ill link-building methods used by some of our fellow blogger friends!

The reason?

Most of the forums used for spamming are based on a particular platform like PHPBB, vBulletin, SMF, etc. Also all the tools used to create profiles and post on these forums follow the same pattern which can now be tracked by Google. Thus whenever Google detects this pattern or sees a lot of links coming from forums in the same pattern, it simply gives them no value or in fact values these links negatively and instead of seeing a positive rank change in search engines, your ranks go down!

Here’s how Google does all this:

• You start forum link building.
• Google spiders crawl the backlinks and you may see a temporary rank increase.
• Google is well aware of the tools used, the platforms spammed and the pattern followed and thus devalues these links as soon as it identifies them.
• Your ranks go down and you may even face a long-term penalty!

What Does This Mean For You?

I think you can answer this question yourself! If you make use of these link building methods, Google can axe your blog anytime and you may receive a huge setback! You may lose your rankings, lose most of your traffic and thus your earnings are all set to decline!

So What Should You Do?

CHILL - If you have never built any forum links, just chill! You need not do anything. Keep on following your regular link-building methods and dare not build any forum links or links from spammy sources like the ones I’ve mentioned in this post. If you missed them, here are some of them:

• Bulk blog comments
• Forum posting
• Forum profile creation
• Article marketing (Stay away from over-used article directories)
• Fake trackback a.k.a. trackback spamming
• Posting on “paid-link” only blogs
• Bulk bookmarking on non-reputed bookmarking sites just for getting dofollow backlinks. (Good if you bookmark in a limit)
• Many more..

STOP – If you are using any of the spammy and unsafe link-building methods mentioned above, stop using them right now and concentrate on better link-building methods like guest blogging, Commentluv, etc. Some safe link building methods (as of today) are:

• Guest blogging
• Commentluv link-building
• Bookmarking (In a limit and only on non-overused sites)
• Submitting posts to reputed blog networks like Blog Engage, Blokube, etc.
• Buying in-content links secretly ;)
• Some more..

I think this is all you need to know about forum link building! If you have any questions or want to share something about this with us, don’t hesitate to comment!