Facebook, Craigslist and Blog Comment Linkbuilding Mistakes

Building links is one of the best strategies at this time for increasing your rankings in the search engines, especially if those are high-quality, relevant links and you're adding value to the web. And if you're gonna market a personal training business or a health club, you gotto get hip to search engine marketing.

One mistake I see a lot of fitness professionals make is that they'll add a bunch of spammy links on Craigslist, Facebook, and by commenting on other people's blogs.

Now, if these links are to help you drive traffic and add value to the internet and add value to the user, then these are good links.  But, the mistake I see is that a lot of fitness professionals are just blasting these links out there to try to help them in the search engines, when this doesn't help them one damn bit. And many of these links not only don't improve the visitors experience they do a disservice to the user.

For example I'll see a health club or personal trainer marketing on Craigslist with a bunch of keyword rich anchor text links thinking this will help them rank better for those terms in Google.

Comment links on most blogs and links on Craigslist are no-follow links, meaning they contain a little rel="nofollow" code in the hyperlinks which tells the search engines not to pass any juice (page rank) to your site. (Some blogs do actually allow page rank to be followed through in their comments but at this time the majority of high page rank blogs do not.)

And links on Facebook don't even get crawled by the search engines.

You can actually use this firefox plugin to see what links are followed and which ones aren't as you surf the web. This can be an indispensable tool for knowing which links will help you in the engines and which ones won't. But remember, it's not all about the engines, if you're adding value to the web and can get targeted traffic from a link they by all means put it up, that's what good link building is all about.

If you're trying to build links to help you in the search engines, just make sure you're spending your time and energy on the right kinds of links.  If you really focus on links that build value to the web and help the visitors of the sites where you're placing your links, then you're on the right track.  But, if you're just blasting a bunch of spammy no-follow links out there to help your site rank in the search engines, you're wasting your time.

Work Less and Make More

Chris McCombs is a mixed martials arts marketing and fitness business specialist, teaching fitness business owners how to make more money while working less hours.