With so much competition on the internet these days, it comes as no surprise that webmasters are constantly in pursuit of new ways to build links and maintain their position in search rankings through whatever means necessary. As the years have progressed, more and more ways to do this have surfaced in the wake of Google and others nerfing or penalizing older and more spam-based techniques. The modern era of link building is quickly becoming one where quality is a heck of lot more important than quantity, but some people remain stuck in that old mentality. In the following article, we’ll discuss some scenarios in which you shouldn’t waste your time building links.

Barely Visible or Invisible Links

While the concept of link building has for ages revolved around the notion of having as many links as possible in as many places as possible, the new strategy of link building focuses more on putting links in front of other people’s faces than it does pinging search engines with hidden ones. Likewise, poorly-performing websites have little value at all to you, and may even backfire if the reason their poor performance exists is due to improper or blackhat SEO strategies. It isn’t worth your time to focus on building links to sites that have little to no foot traffic, as the primary goal of link building should be to put links in places where people will see them and click on them. There is far less inherent value in having links on various websites for clout these days than there is in driving traffic through them.

Links from Spam Blogs

In the past, it was very common to have a variety of links originating from sites that functioned more like directories or portals for advertising other sites. We all probably remember these sites, and remember trying to get listed on each one for additional clout with search engines. These once tried-and-true methods of link building have now become a liability in the world of pinging search engines and can drastically damage your brand. Not only will you not receive any traffic from these spam blogs and sites, but you will also see your search engine rankings begin to decrease as a result of the penalties Google and others will slap on to your site.

Links from Irrelevant Sites

Even if you are able to get a link placed on a website that does everything right and has tons of traffic, you need to ask yourself if the site in question has any relevance whatsoever to your brand. Sometimes, we can find ourselves with the chance to obtain a link on a page with high PR, but the website in question has no connection to our topics or subject material. In cases like this, there is no reason to spend ample amounts of effort pursuing some avenues, as (mentioned earlier) the name of the game surrounding link building is traffic and relevance. Links on other prominent websites will do very well for your brand when compared to less successful endeavours where there is a ton of relevant traffic.