Have you received an email from an agency claiming that it can secure a big stack of backlinks for your vape business for one low, low price? We suggest running far, far away because there is nothing worse in SEO than a shady link building agency.

Elsewhere on eCig One, we’ve discussed the many reasons why working with the wrong SEO agency can ruin your vape business. In this article, we’re going to focus specifically on link building because some agencies do nothing but that.

How can you tell whether you’re potentially dealing with a shady link building agency? It’s not hard, actually, because most of them are shady. In fact, when we launched our vape SEO service many years ago, we largely based our link building strategy on watching what the shady agencies did and simply doing the opposite.

In this article, we’re going to share some of the sure signs that a link building agency isn’t on the up and up. If you’re thinking about dealing with an agency that has any of these qualities, you should be very wary.

First, though, let’s start with some basics. What is link building, and why does it matter?

What Is Link Building, and Why Is It Important?

If you’re new to running a website, the term “link building” might seem foreign to you. It won’t be for long, though, because inbound links pointing to your website – also called “backlinks” – are crucial to your site’s ability to rank well on Google and other search engines.

When Google first launched in 1998, one of the reasons for its success was the fact that it seemed to produce better results than other search engines. The reason for that was an algorithm called PageRank, which essentially assigned values to websites based on how many inbound links they had. A website with many inbound links would have a better chance to earn a high ranking for a given search, and a link from a site with many backlinks would be worth more than a link from a site with only a few backlinks. Basically, backlinks were used as a form of currency that conveyed trust and authority between websites.

Although Google’s ranking algorithm is infinitely more complex today than it was in 1998, PageRank is still a part of it because it’s still the best way that Google has to judge whether a website’s content is authoritative and useful. In other words, your site needs backlinks if you want to rank well for competitive search terms.

Link building is particularly important for businesses in the vaping industry because there aren’t many options for marketing a vape business online. You can’t bid for keywords on Google, and you can’t promote your content on major social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. That means on-site content and link building are pretty much your only options for crawling your way up the ranks on Google. It’s not surprising, then, that shady link building agencies often target vape businesses. Vape backlinks are hard to earn.

Now that you understand the importance of backlinks, let’s talk about why the wrong backlinks can be so problematic.

All Links Are Not Good Links

SEO has always been a bit of a cat-and-mouse game between search engines and website owners because as soon as unscrupulous webmasters figure out a way to game a particular ranking algorithm, the search engine’s results become less helpful. At that point, the algorithm is essentially obsolete and must be updated to account for the new spamming tactic. Many of Google’s major algorithm updates have focused on devaluing the tactics used by shady link builders.

The Google “Penguin” algorithm update in 2012 was one of the search engine’s biggest initiatives for combating link spam. Penguin focused on automatically identifying low-quality links and devaluing those links so they would provide no benefit. Penguin remains a part of Google’s overall ranking algorithm today.

In addition to identifying and devaluing low-quality backlinks algorithmically, Google also occasionally conducts manual quality checks to see what website owners are up to. In these quality checks, Google looks for the truly toxic backlinks that are signs of highly manipulative link building. If a website fails a manual quality audit, Google may remove that site from its index entirely.

Working with a shady link building agency, in short, is a bad idea because it’s highly unlikely that you’ll receive any benefit at all. The types of links that shady agencies build are so easily caught by the Penguin algorithm that Google simply ignores them. In the worst case, working with a shady agency can result in your site being delisted from Google – that would be enough to end most businesses.

Now that you understand why backlinks matter and why the wrong links can hurt you, let’s get to the main focus of this article. How can you identify a shady link building agency? We’ll start with the biggest giveaway of them all.

They Contacted You

If a link building agency contacts you, it’s quite safe to conclude that you should not work with them.

It might surprise you that we can say something like that with such confidence, but it’ll make sense if you really think about it. The purpose of link building is to improve your rankings for your most important search terms. If that happens, your website will get more traffic.

If a link builder’s technique works, they should never need to send unsolicited emails because their customers should be coming to them. The fact that a link building agency needs to resort to sending cold emails clearly indicates that their strategy isn’t working. If they can’t generate traffic for their own website, the idea that they could generate traffic for your site is pretty audacious.

At eCig One, we have never used cold emails to attract business. Our clients either find us on their own or are referred to us by other clients.

They’re Not Transparent About Where Your Link Will Appear

If you’re paying for an outreach campaign, you deserve to choose which publishers will be approached. If a link builder promises to procure a link from a website with “DR of 50+,” that’s not enough information and actually tells you very little about the quality of the publisher. Why won’t they just tell you what the website is?

DR – an abbreviation for “Domain Rating” – is a metric that’s widely used in the SEO field. It attempts to quantify the value of a link from a particular website based in the quantity and quality of the links pointing to that site. A link from a site with a high DR may be more valuable to your vape business than a link from a site with low DR, but that’s only one part of the overall picture because metrics are easy to game.

A website can have an extremely high DR but still receive no traffic.

If you’re going to obtain a link from a website, you don’t just want to know its DR. You also want to know all of these other things.

• Does the website produce its own high-quality content in house, or does it only exist to sell links? Google can easily identify a website that only exists to sell links.
• Does the website receive organic human traffic, or does Google ignore it completely? If a site has thousands of articles that don’t rank for anything, it’s safe to assume that a link from that site to yours will have no value.
• Will the placement be safe for your brand, or will your link be shown next to links promoting shady niches like gambling, adult entertainment and payday loans?

At eCig One, we investigate publishers carefully to confirm that they receive substantial human traffic. This ensures that our links will provide real value to your vape business. You will always know the publishers before your links are placed.

Their Strategy Includes Link Insertions

Most link building takes place within new editorial content. This means that the link to your site appears in a newly published article that may also link to other high-authority websites in order to provide additional value for readers. Writing vape content isn’t easy to do, though, so some link builders take the easy way out and try to offer link insertions instead.

Here’s an example of a backlink package that you definitely don’t want.

A link insertion is a new link that’s added to an existing article.  For example, let’s suppose that this article contained the text “disposable vapes,” and a link builder approached us and asked us to turn the text “disposable vapes” into a link to their client’s website. That would be a link insertion.

Link insertions sound good on the surface, because they’re a potential avenue for building many links quickly. In practice, though, this technique is usually a waste of time because the links end up providing no value at all.

Why would that be?

Imagine that you’re the owner of a website with a successful article about disposable vapes. Your article receives thousands of visitors every day, so it’s a strong generator of revenue for you. Someone approaches you and offers you a bit of money to add a new link to that article. Would you do it?

Of course you wouldn’t – the small payment up front wouldn’t make up for the long-term cost of driving traffic away from your website.

That’s why link insertions don’t work. Website owners don’t sell link insertions except in content that doesn’t rank for anything and doesn’t receive any traffic. So, the value for you is basically zero. If a link building agency tries to sell you a package that includes link insertions, run away.

At eCig One, we do not offer link insertions. We obtain placements through new editorial content only.

They Write Content that Has No Value

In the previous section, we explained why we think it’s so important to obtain links through new editorial content rather than through link insertions in old, stale content that receives no traffic. This strategy only works, though, if the content actually has value.

Before working with any link building agency – even one that promises to obtain links only through new content – it’s extremely important for you to see what that agency’s content looks like.

We believe that every article is important, regardless of whether it’s published on your site or someone else’s site. In order to rank on Google, an article should be written with a specific topic or question in mind, and it should address that topic or question completely.

Too many link building articles are absolute fluff. They’re either based on topics that no one would ever search for, or they’re based on topics that have already been covered by other websites thousands of times. If an agency sends you an article with a title like “10 Benefits of Vaping You Need to Know About,” you should run far away. It’s also a good idea to run the article through an AI detector because AI-written link building articles are highly unlikely to ever rank for anything.

At eCig One, our clients read and approve all articles before they’re published. No article will ever be published without your approval. We are vaping experts, and we know what we’re talking about. We do not use AI.

They Promise to Deliver Bulk Links Extremely Quickly

When you look at a link building agency’s promotional material, it should throw up an enormous red flag if that company promises to deliver a large number of links in a very short time frame because there’s simply no way to build bulk links quickly without automation. Here are a few of the methods that a shady link building agency might use for a bulk project.

• They may use automated software to leave comments on blog posts, create profile pages on forums or generate blogs on free blogging websites. These types of links are extremely easy for Google to identify and will either have virtually no value or will ultimately result in your website receiving a penalty.
• They may use software that scans websites for security holes and exploits those vulnerabilities to place links. This practice is obviously illegal. Your links will also disappear as soon as the owners of those websites discover the vulnerabilities.
• They may use generative AI to create articles that say nothing of substance and provide no value whatsoever. These articles will never rank for anything on Google, and the links contained in them will have little to no value.

We’re Not Like Other Link Building Agencies

Earning high-quality permanent backlinks is very hard to do. That’s especially true in the vaping industry because many publishers consider vaping a “gray niche” and don’t want to link to vape businesses. Shady link building agencies prey on this and will try to exploit the desperation that business owners feel when they see how hard it is to compete in this industry. We know how it’s done because we’ve been building great vape websites since 2010. Connect with us now to discuss what we can do for you.