5 Mistakes You Should Avoid In Link Building

However, even seasoned SEO specialists commit mistakes that compromise the link profile of a website. The first step to avoid these mistakes is to learn about them, of course.

So, let’s dig in.

Here Are 5 Link Building Errors That You Should Avoid:

• Purchasing Links
• Getting High Link Velocity
• Ignoring Links from Irrelevant Niches
• Spamming the Link Building
• Focusing on Quantity Instead of Quality

If you want a well-rounded search engine optimization for your website, quality link building is a must – this is a practice easily done by effective SEO specialists.

Having knowledge of a high-quality and efficient link building strategy sets you apart from your competitors.

We’ve discussed some of the SEO link building essentials which are focusing on unique and high-quality content, correct anchor usage, minding relevant and reliable links, getting do-follow links, linking to trustworthy and niche-related websites.

These are basically natural and good old-fashioned link building best practices for search engine optimization. Often, we call them white-hat SEO.

How about the black-hat link building practices to avoid?

Some faulty SEO link building practices are the buying and selling of backlinks. This can be surprising because most SEO pros have purchased links at some point in their career.

Although search engines will not really know which links were paid for versus links that are naturally earned, there are plenty of clues or patterns that can signal foul play for search engine algorithms.

Purchasing links, once caught, can severely damage a website ranking – taking such risk of buying backlinks will never justify the reward, if any.

Unfortunately, you can’t build links too fast. Search engines, especially Google, penalize websites with high link velocity.

So, what exactly is high link velocity?

Remember when you were just starting to build your website?

Your blog readership was quite small and you get a few backlinks to none.

However, as your readership grew, the links pointing back to your site also grew – this is a natural increase of linking building.

On the contrary, if you extensively manipulate the sources linking back to your website, it will tell the search engines that you’re getting high backlink velocity to your site. As a matter of fact, even though the links are legitimate but they are unnaturally too many and too fast, you’ll still get penalized.

So, make sure to maintain a rational link building strategy.

Some low-quality websites might send a do-follow link to your website – this means that they are purposely or un-purposely telling the search engines that algorithms can recognize your website as one of them.

Most often than not, this paints a bad picture for your website in the ‘eyes’ of the search engine “crawlers”.

Would you allow a porn website link to the website of your legal service? Of course, you won’t!

Now, to defend yourself from these spammy backlink attacks, check your website backlinks and disavow links from irrelevant niches or websites that may “stain your reputation” by unnaturally linking to you.

You can also use a free backlink checker online to see examine your dofollow and nofollow backlinks.

Having too many links pointing to your site in a short period of time is one way of backlink spamming.

Another most common mistake of link building, which is also considered spamming, is anchor text overload.

Naturally, an anchor text is used by the referring source to tell both the user and the search engines what your website is all about and this varies from link to link.

Now, an anchor text overload happens if you use the exact same keywords every time you create a backlink – this will eventually trigger a warning to the search engines that you’re overly manipulating the sources linking back to your website… and as a result, you’ll get penalized.

So, make sure to use the related key terms such as long-tail keywords and mix up the linking structure in the content.

Google and other search engines prefer a website that has a few high-quality backlinks than one that has too many but from low-quality and even irrelevant niches.

If you focus on the number of backlinks that you get in a day or in a week and doesn’t really care about the trustworthiness of the sources linking back to you, it can still be recognized by the search engines as spamming or shady link building.

Consider the experiment made by Marcus Taylor – within 24 hours, he sent 10, 000 links to his experimental website that has been ranking #1 for a certain keyword on Google for a few weeks.

After a few more weeks, the website drastically dropped out of search results – it can’t be found even using brand searches and it has never stepped foot on the first pages of the search engines.

This only goes to show that it is very important to create a link building strategy that allows you to earn a variety of backlinks over time.

Ready to Embark on an Outstanding Link Building Strategy?

SEO link building can be a pretty extensive task, considering its importance on search engine optimization as a huge ranking factor. If you feel a bit daunted, that’s normal.

That’s why it’s best to leverage the expertise of effective SEO specialists to manage the link building for your website.

If you are a business owner looking for an outstanding link building strategy that will set you apart from other websites and on top of your competitors in the search engine pages, we can lend a helping hand. Let’s talk.