The Trifecta Of Dangerous SEO: Blog Posting, Forum Posting, and the Press Release Service

Off-page SEO, in general, can — and often should be — looked at in terms of how ‘secure’ your SEO investment is, ranging from the very secure like article writing and distribution to the largely insecure, like blog posting, forum posting, and engaging a press release service. The difference is that, by and large, the more dangerous SEO involves putting a link somewhere that might have little to no effect for various reasons — but at the same time, might have an explosive or even viral effect.

Blog Posting
This doesn’t refer to the art of creating your own blog and keeping up on it — by ‘blog posting’, we mean ‘commenting on relevant blogs’. Blog comments are dangerous links for one simple reason: they can be edited away at any time by an overzealous blogger who decides that you’re only in it for the backlink (or he just doesn’t like what you have to say.) Blog posting is also moderately dangerous in that it can be difficult to exactly match a blog with the subject matter of your website, and backlinking sites that Google thinks is irrelevant can be destructive to Google’s impression of what your site is actually about.

On the other hand, Google adores blogs, and gives them a startling amount of weight — so a comment from a good, relevant blog tends to do more for your rankings than a similar link from a non-blog site. That power makes blogs attractive enough to keep commenting on regardless of the danger.

Forum Posting
Like blog posting, forums generally involve an administrator who can arbitrarily remove all of your links on a whim. That’s not good. On the other hand, getting a good link in your signature on some active forums are likely to drive long-term traffic. Forum posts are also relatively likely to get linked to from elsewhere, making forum signature links a pretty valuable tool despite the risks.

Press Release Service
A Press Release is always an OK thing to do — at the minimum, you’ll get a few backlinks from a few moderate-PR sites that list every press release ever released. But a press release is unique in that it’s essentially designed to go viral — i.e. get syndicated across multiple news sites — from the get-go. The danger in a press release isn’t that you might lose it entirely, like the others, but that you might sink a lot of time and effort into making a great press release only to have it ignored.