Links are the most important factor in Google's ranking algorithms. That's why so many people tried to manipulate the links that point to their websites in the past.

This used to work until Google found out how to detect manipulated links. Websites that used these links were penalized and they lost their rankings. Building links that way can still work for some keywords, but it is very risky. In addition, the results do not last.

In general, Google's latest ranking algorithms simply ignore spam links. If your website has very many of these spam links, your website still can get a manual penalty. For that reason, you should avoid these outdated link building techniques:

• Blog comment spam.
• Forum spam and forum signature spam.
• Paid links that do not use the rel=nofollow tag (for example site-wide footer links).
• Private blog networks (a network of small websites that are just used for link building).
• Link directories that link to all kind of websites.
• Unrelated article directories and low quality guest-posts.

All of these methods seem easy. Unfortunately, all of them are risky and they can have a negative influence on your search engine rankings.

Link building is not difficult if you follow some basic rules:

• Links that are created automatically in bulk are bad.
• The easier it is to get a link, the less influence it has on the rankings of the linked page.
• Links that are good for human visitors are also good for search engines.

First of all, you should remove all unnatural links that point to your website. The Link Disinfection tool in SEOprofiler can help you to do that:

Just enter the URL of your website and the Link Disinfection tool will show you the links that you should remove. Contact the site owners and ask them to remove the link. If that is not possible, the Link Disinfection tool will create a 'Disavow links' file for you that you can send to Google.

After removing the bad links, you can start to build better links that point to your site. The link building tools in SEOprofiler will help you to do that. For example, SEOprofiler offers these tools:

• Link Profiler: analyze the backlinks of any website and get detailed statistics.
• Link Manager: keep track of your link building activities, check if a website still links to your site, evaluate potential link partners, contact other websites.
• Hub Finder: find websites that link to several of your competitors, these sites are likely to link to your site, too.
• Link Opportunity Finder: quickly find websites that are related to a particular topic and likely to link to your site.
• Starter backlinks: submit your website to authority sites in your category.
• Local hubs: make sure that your website is listed in all relevant local directories.

"In a video on YouTube, Google’s John Mueller said that the ‘noindex,follow’ command in the meta tags of a web page will eventually be interpreted as a ‘noindex,nofollow’ command.

That is not surprising. If Google does not index a page, it cannot follow the links on the page."

"Now that Google devalues links instead of demoting the site with the bad links, Google keeps saying, you don't know if an unnatural link helps a site rank or not [...]

They spend a lot of time doing all of this stuff to kind of build these unnatural links and in the end they don't really have an effect. And they could have spent that time actually doing something useful for the long term for their website,"

"Google works directly with the third-party review source (e.g., TripAdvisor) to integrate the content. In the example below, TripAdvisor reviews for Southern California hotel Terranea are available under the 'view Google reviews' link in the Knowledge Panel."

"Citation consistency acts as a trust factor for Google, and can impact your rankings, and whether or not you’ll appear in the Local Search results. [...]

The more times the web mentions your business, the greater confidence Google has in your information. Every mention and citation builds the confidence that Google has to show your listing."