Bad Links Are When You Know You’ll Be Getting A Link, Bing Says

10 SEO Myths Reviewed by Microsoft’s Duane Forrester on the Bing Search Blog sent ripples through the SEO community when Duane wrote that if you know you are about to get a link, then you are doing something wrong.

Duane specifically wrote:

You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from. If you do, that’s the wrong path.

Duane also added that you should want “links to surprise you,” those are the true organic links.

Why was this so shocking to hear? Maybe Bing telling you that if you reach out through content marketing or other techniques to ask people to link to you, without payment or other forms of encouragement, it may be against their guidelines. Or maybe it is Duane just telling you what the ultimate type of link is and that you should not focus on building links but rather building content and features that people want to use and consume.

Either way, the statement from Duane was bold enough to cause a lot of discussion in the community.