It’s probably not a good feeling to know that the organic results your company has achieved are based on illicit tactics, that if discovered could have a long term negative impact on your ability to show up prominently in Google. Interestingly, there are likely a lot of companies who are in that position and are unaware of their predicament.

I am not a technical individual, so this post is written for the marketer, not the programmer. My goal is simply to encourage you to incorporate a best practices SEO game plan with any tactics you employ for your website and make sure your site is up to code.

One prevalent “black hat” approach that companies are employing, which was at the center of a firestorm last week for retailer JC Penny, is paying to acquire inbound links from websites whose main purpose is link cultivation activities, rather than any type of business activity where links would serve a value to someone visiting that original website. The greater the relevance between the site the link is on and the site it’s being linked to, the better.

Google weights links in their natural search algorithm under the assumption that if other websites link to yours, then yours must have some type of value for people coming from the original site. That concept makes sense in theory, but linking is often abused. Are your incoming links from reputable and relevant websites? If any of them are questionable, now’s an excellent time to probe more deeply and reevaluate them. Lastly, a quality (and best practices) link building effort typically occurs gradually, not with a large quantity of links being added over a short period of time.