If you’ve been paying attention, you’re not going to win any awards for guessing that internal linking are links around your own website. 

All the calls to action to our “Contact page”? Those are internal links. Every item in our top level menu, an internal link. Every link in our blog to somewhere else on our site – you guessed it. Internal. Every link from our blog posts to other websites? Gotcha – not internal.

Internal links are crucial for directing users around your site. All the content on our site is written here to educate you, with the ultimate goal of asking you to get in touch. Our internal links reflect this, whilst also pointing you in the right direction towards if you want more information before continuing.

Internal links are also super important for Google. If there are a lot of links pointing to another page on the website, chances are, that page is quite important. This is your way of letting Google know this. If you want Google to value a particular page, show it’s important and put it in your menu, your footer – across the site!

An external link is exactly the opposite of an internal link – it’s a link that takes you away from the website you’re on, to another website.

For example, if we were to build a link to Wikipedia, this would count as an external link. This would be transferring authority to Wikipedia from Novus’ website (and how blessed they would be for it)!

External links from other websites coming back to your website are one of the best ways to start gaining authority in the eyes of Google. And whilst there’s plenty to keep track of and Google will tell you they don’t like link building – it’s an evergreen SEO tactic that will stand the test of time.

If you’re a jedi, clean and pristine and on the right side of Google – this is the approach you’ll take. It’s all above board. It’s the stuff Google themselves tell you you need to do. 

It isn’t easy and it’s not going to yield results quickly. 

But it is sustainable and safe. 

You’re not going to ruffle any feathers with the goody-two-shoes approach to link building. 

But is being good always the way to get what you want? 

And is Google ever going to really tell you how to smash the organic rankings? Afterall, all they really want is for you to spend your hard earned cash on Google Ads.

White hat SEO is the jedi. It’s lightsaber is probably blue, it’s never thought outside the box in it’s life and it’s forever doing what it’s told to do. 

It might get there eventually, but it’s not dynamic, effective or efficient.

Greed leads to the dark side. If you consider yourself an SEO Sith, this is where you’re going to feel more at home. And for all our bashing of White Hat SEO – we’re going to bash Black Hat SEO a lot harder.

If you’re more Darth Maul than Obi Wan Kenobi, if you like to flagrantly stomp all over the rules (which Google make very clear) then this is a surefire way to ruin your website in the long term. But you might strike SEO gold in the short term.

We’re not going to help you with this – it’s better for everyone if our clients don’t get penalised by Google. 

Penalised, banned, ruined? Yes. Remember, Google tells you what you can and can’t do. 

However, if you do choose to follow the path to the dark side, like becoming a Sith this can seem like a great option at first. 

Almost every Black Hat SEOer gets caught out eventually, but the short term (say, 3-6 months) might just yield you some big results. However, the greater the rise, the harder the fall, and you’re likely to lose a lot of money in the process.

If you want the official stance, Google have this to say: “[Black Hat SEO] may lead to a site being removed entirely from the Google index or otherwise affected by an algorithmic or manual spam action.“

It might look good at the time, but we’d advise avoiding this one.

The third, final and woefully underutilised hat – the Grey Hat.

It’s grey. Bit of black and a bit of white. Anything that falls under Grey Hat is still perfectly legit, it will get results. 

It does now, it always has and it always will. 

Remember Google publish the what you can and can’t do list. But they’re never going to tell you exactly how to get the best results. They want your ad money!

Grey Hat techniques aren’t on the “you’re going to pay the price for this” list.

They’re on the ‘slightly skew the rules to your advantage without getting into trouble” list. Grey. Not black, not white. Just grey.

Anakin Skywalker / Darth Vader – good, or bad? A bit of both ultimately.

“Get results you will. Get in trouble you won’t.” Yoda (probably).

In short, a Web 2.0 is the use of a free blogging platform such as blogspot.com or WordPress to create a faux website and use this to build links.

Back in our day, web 2.0s were a surefire way to fly up the rankings quickly and easily with minimal effort. 

Google’s since caught up though – here’s what John Mueller, Google Webmaster Trends Analyst said about them:
“That’s not going to help your website, that’s just going to be considered as spam so that’s a really bad idea… you should definitely not be doing this kind of spam. And if an agency is doing this kind of spam for you I would switch to a different agency”

The defence rests, your honour.

Another old school quick SEO win from the dark ages. Until the spammers took over, this used to work a treat. Site owners and Google got wise to it and the rest is history. 

If you have somewhere for users to comment on your site, it’s likely you’ll be inundated with spam comments trying to link to all types of nefarious sources. 

Like all illicit link building methods, there’s arguably some small merit to this, but it’s cheap and tacky and we won’t touch it. At best pointless, at worst damaging. Don’t bother.

Similarly to the others, this was a golden SEO tactic that some incredibly shrewd agencies still manage to leverage (although they’ll never admit it).

The trick is to build a series of blog websites and interconnect them all. From there you steadily build the external authority of these sites with new content and links before using them to link to unsuspecting clients.

This all works wonderfully, right until Google catches on and slaps a hefty penalty on the entire PBN (and client websites in turn). 

Google hates PBNs because they’re low effort, lazy and contribute nothing of value. PBNs are all fun and games – until they’re not…