A Good Example of Bad Link Building

Link building is one of the key strategies of senior care inbound marketing. In fact, inbound links to your content account for up to 75% of your keyword ranking.

Link building requires both link quality and link quantity. Link quality is calculated based on the reputation of the sites that link to you. You can quick add links with high quality by optimizing your LinkedIn profile, submitting articles that link to you to Digg or ask well-followed Del.icio.us users to bookmark your content.

The most obvious option to increase the number of inbound links is to respond to blog posts and include a link back to your site. But does how you comment matter? Below is a comment I read today; I removed the identifiable information as it wasn’t relevant to the example. The topic of the blog post was home care.

Finding Long-Term Care can become stressful as we age, and we may not know as much as we need to know about aging. <COMPANY NAME> is available at no cost to you or a loved one looking for senior care, advise, or services. You can search for care by city, state, or by zip code. This website is easy-to-use, award-winning, and has many components that are beneficial to the aging adult.

Don’t hesitate to visit and sign-up for a <COMPANY NAME> account. You will have the ability to search care facilities, use online calculators, and look for other products and services. You will then be able to save the things you found to your <COMPANY NAME> workspace. Sharing your workspace is also quite beneficial. If you have friends or family interested in the care or services you found, it is easy to share these things with them.

Can Link Building Negatively Impact Your Brand?

When I read this, a question popped in my mind: At what point does link build negatively impact your brand? I would argue that, while these messages make it past AKISMET and other spam catchers, they actually hurt the the brand reputation of the companies that post them.

In fact, I pinged a few people who had read the article, and nearly all of them shrugged off the comment as spam. They also indicated that spammy comments detract from the brand’s value.

Link building through blog responses offer a unique opportunity to generate links to your site and establish yourself as an authority to the readers of your comment. In a fairly narrow niche like senior care marketing, reputation is more important than ever.

Remember – every opportunity to present yourself and your company should reinforce your expertise and your brand. Being labeled a link-spammer can negate the any good comments you provide in the future.

Photo: Pupski