All webmasters should be familiar with Google’s quality guidelines – http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
The last thing you want when optimising your site is to be blacklisted and have all your effort wasted.

People refer to SEO as black hat or white hat. Let’s be clear, there is no such thing as white hat SEO – it’s all varying shades of grey. In my books, White Hat optimisation is writing a good site that is designed 100% for the visitor – this is good, but it’s not “optimisation”. As soon as you add tweak your keywords or title tags for the Search Engines, you are engaging in grey hat SEO. You need to make sure your optimisations fall into the light grey area, as opposed to the dark grey where you risk getting penalised.

The paragraph in Google’s guidelines many webmasters will be concerned about follows…

“Don’t participate in link schemes designed to increase your site’s ranking or PageRank. In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links.”

There are 2 important things to note here.
Firstly, Google doesn’t like “link schemes”. This is a linking strategy that is solely for the search engines, not for the visitor.
Secondly, Google makes it clear that if you link to a banned site, then this will have a negative impact on your ranking, perhaps even a ban for your site.

Link Vault is an automated way of setting up text link advertising across other related websites. This in itself is certainly no breach of the Quality guidelines, but you do need to be able to justify it’s existance to Google. In other words, do the ads provide some value to your visitors, or is it simply a link scheme?

If Link Vault / Reciprocal Exchange / Blog Spam is done solely for Google, then it’s a link scheme. If your site has no real content, just Adsense a reciprocal directory and Link Vault, then it’s probably a link scheme.

However if your site has real content on it, is well laid out, and has some related text links on the page (along with other good information), then it’s simply advertising. Taken in context with the rest of your content, 5 additional text links on your page isn’t a problem.

I recommend you treat your Link Vault links like you would any other SEO – take the time to do it properly. Don’t bury them in your footer, or cloak them in hidden CSS. Only place the links on sites that have genuine content. Ensure the links blend in with your site design, and aren’t just tacked on as an afterthought. Make sure your other SEO efforts are light-grey hat. In the context of a well maintained site, adding LV will not make your page look like spam, and is therefore light-grey hat SEO just like reciprocal linking.

The second part of Google’s statement is a little more difficult to control. Because Link Vault is automated (that’s why you are signing up right – to avoid manual link building) you have limited control over the sites you are linking to.
Firstly, All sites are checked by a person before being added to the LV network. Next, all links are regularly checked to ensure they are cached with Google. If a site has no pages cached with Google, this is a sign it may have been blacklisted and it’s removed from the network. Link Vault does try to match links amongst the same categories wherever possible. If you are in an industry where “bad neighborhoods” are particularly common (mortgages, mens health etc) then you may want more control over who you link to. For most other industries, the Link Vault checks provide a good safety net.

Link Vault can be a valueable SEO tool, used in conjunction with other SEO strategies. As with any SEO, care must be taken to ensure it doesn’t look like spam. If your site already employs other “dark-grey hat” optimisations then Link Vault may not be a great idea, but for many sites it’s a great tool to have available.

By Harvey Kane

Harvey Kane is a Web Developer based in Auckland, New Zealand. He is available for freelance Web Development and SEO.