Backlinks are one of the most critical factors that determine the Google search ranking of your website. Building links in high DA (Domain Authority) websites that point back to your site will get Google thinking that you are a good website as well.
Building links might seem straightforward, but it is not. It takes a lot to get excellent websites talking about you, and Google believing in you. You will need to do it in the right way.
Having said that, here are some terrible link building mistakes that companies commit while doing SEO.
Focusing a Lot on The Link Only
Say that one of the leading websites in your niche credits you for something. This link is visible to thousands of people in a day, and it brings you a lot of traffic.
Well, it will only bring people to your site. The link can’t guarantee those individuals buy your service
Thus, the first thing you need to do is create fantastic content. This is necessary- because of the recent introduction of the Panda and Penguin Algorithms, the quality and relevancy of content is the single most important factor that Google considers for ranks.
To get it more transparent, this is how Google processes a page. First, it assesses the quality of Backlinks, and then it checks the content. Your website ranks good only if both of them are decent.
What Should You Do?
Hire some good content creators including those who can write, make videos, draw infographics, etc. Then, you will need to analyze all of those content. Start creating backlinks once you are assured that they can intrigue people.
Creating a Lot of Backlinks
This is one link building strategy to must absolutely avoid if you want results. Well, are not telling you not to create as much as backlinks as you can. We are only saying to do it only if you can verify that the website you are going to partner with is good.
Remember, if the number of backlinks mattered, scam sites would pop out on the top of the rankings for every query. You should avoid sites of those types at any cost. It will be better for you to not create a backlink at all rather than on a domain whose only concern is to make money rather than help people
What Should You Do?
Focus on the quality of backlinks rather than its number. Create backlinks on credible sites on your niche.
As an additional tip, you can open this website and paste the link of the site you want to create a backlink on. Check the column where there’s “SS”- that is its scam sore. As a rule of thumb, don’t approach the site if their spam score is more than 30%.
Buying or Selling Links
Buying or selling links is a big no-no. Well, for some people it might seem a legit way. However, John Mueller of Google explicitly stated in one of his twitter posts that buying or selling of link will hurt your website rankings.
The purpose of the Google search results is to help people with the best information on the web. This best information comes in the form of excellent content which is liked by people and accredited by the search engine itself.
If your link building strategy consists of paying someone, you are playing an underhand method to put your material in place it doesn’t deserve to be. You might ask how Google can even find out. Well, a high DA website adding a link to a not up to par content all of a sudden will raise concerns. It will penalize both, the buyer and the seller. Well, so we could also say that if a party is willing to take your money, they might not be what you think they are.
What Should You Do?
You can’t exchange links for money. Instead, you should increase the quality of the content, even up to the point that other sites want to take your work as a reference. If you really wish to have backlinks, you can ask your content writers to create guest blog posts on other websites. On the other hand, press articles can also be a good idea.
Using Private Blog Networks
This especially relates to cheap SEO agencies. They don’t have enough funds and expertise to build a genuine network, so they have their ‘team’ of websites where they post each other’s links. People who are just starting on SEO might think private blog network is a good idea, but it is far from the truth.
The world of SEO is competitive. You will need a ‘win at any cost’ attitude. But, if you build a network of a blog just to make links, you have already lost. At the same time, private blog networks don’t care about what’s inside the link. This one time, they might have a world-class article, but after some days, a URL to a poorly constructed, grammatically incorrect writing might appear. This will definitely get Google’s attention, and will negatively affect every site on the PBN.
Thus, your link building strategies should only focus on creating genuine connections and not a fake community.
What Should You Do?
Stop the idea of private blog network immediately. You should focus on the networking part; there are more than enough businesses on your niche which might be interested in featuring your site. All you need is to master something we like to call “High-Quality Link Building Outreach.”
Besides that, if an SEO agency tells you anything that gives you a hint about them having their own team to do stuff like this, you should discontinue the service. They are just cheating you and might put you in troubles in the future.
Not Doing Link Reclamation and Rechecks
Every aspect of SEO needs to be maintained promptly. It is no different for backlinks.
Link building strategies will fail if they don’t have any measures for maintaining the created links.
Your website changes over time. You add new pages, new articles, change URLs, and many more. Especially on dynamic sites, the backlinks pointing to some of their pages might be broken when the pages are updated. Thus, to address this, you should frequently check how your links are doing
At the same time, the websites that you have links on might change. For example, a high DA website might lose its popularity so fast that it might turn to another average scam site. Well, this might be the worst-case scenario, but you get the idea. Thus, don’t create a link and let it stay there- many websites are confused when they lose their search rankings all of a sudden. Most of the time, it has the links to do.
What Should You Do?
Keep a record of the sites where you have created links. At the same time, you should create a schedule for yourself to go back and monitor the URLs you have.
Link Building on Unrelated Niche Sites
Imagine yourself as a reader. You are looking for some cooking ingredients. You find an article that talks about cooking rice linking to a company website that sells android software.
Weird, huh? Well, this is how your customers feel when your site has links to all kind of websites.
You need to stick to your niche, both in favor of being relevant to people, and Google recognizing you as a suitable site of your kind. The search engine has its own algorithms for allocating the subjects of websites, and if it finds yours everywhere, it will take it as spam.
What Should You Do?
Even if you have good connections with a site which has millions of visitors, creating backlinks there might hurt you. HErefore, before approaching a site to build links, ensure that your niche is closely related to it.
Over-Optimizing or Not Optimizing Anchor Text
Anchor texts are not really ‘link building strategies,’ but we need to address the issue. When other sites are willing to create a backlink for you, you should request them to create a suitable anchor text. An anchor text is a clickable text which contains the link. For example, this is an anchor text which leads you to the Google Home Page.
Your anchor text should be relevant to the link- a search keyword preferred. This will increase the recognizability, as when Google crawls the link and finds a keyword there, it will consider your site to have exactly what people are looking for.
However, at the same time, you should be careful about not overoptimizing your site. For example, if your website has a lot of headers and footers linking to other pages on your own site, Google will think you are stacking keywords without any content.
What Should You Do?
Nothing big. Just create good anchor text on your site mentions. Also, don’t write words only for the purpose of building links.
Thinking Only About Your Links
Do you know what every good link building strategies contain? It doesn’t only focus on one website.
SEO is a battlefield where you compete to become better than others. Thus, you should carefully monitor the movement of your competitors. Being an SEO company ourselves, we like to do what we call ‘reverse link engineering.’ We analyze the backlink performance of our clients, see where they put their best link and try to replicate it as closely as possible.
What Should You Do?
Take note of your competitors as well. Try your best to find out how and where they put their converting links and do the same. Most of the time, it works.
Other Spam Link Building Strategies
Traditional ways of link building such as commenting with links, rewriting articles and others are very amateur methods of trying to get your website noticed. Things like these seem like desperate in some way, and they actually are- it shows that you are out of ideas of promoting your website.
Google, of course, doesn’t link people doing it and so, pushes the website back if found.
What Should You Do?
If you have good content and follow the healthy practices of building links, you don’t need to do any of that ‘bullcrap.’ Just focus on creating a website whose primary purpose of helping people; you will get excellent search ranking results.
Above All, Choose the Best SEO Company
We said fundamental things in this article. To be honest, good SEO companies already know about every stuff concerning good and bad link building, so your work will be simple if you choose the right SEO company. On top of that, link building is a very sensitive, yet simple to understand. Thus, if the company you are working with is committing faults, we will have to say that you have every rights to question their methodology.
Bottom Line
Building links for your website define how good you do with the SEO campaign. However, you should be very considerate about doing it in the right way. Your link building strategies should not only focus on the number of links, but also where you put them, and what they lead to if a user is to click on them.
We hope you understood these broken link building strategies. We also wish you don’t commit the same mistakes as many other companies do and get a good ranking.
