10 Things to Avoid While Link Building

Did you know that link building changed forever immediately Google released its Penguin algorithm in April 2012? And things have changed even more over time as Google continues to roll out fresh algorithms each day.

Tons of sites suffered a huge drop in traffic because while link building plays a huge role when it comes to Off-Page Optimization, there are multiple link building techniques that Google hates.

There are plenty of ways you can generate backlinks but if you want to get better Google rankings, you must build quality backlinks.

And for you to get high-quality backlinks, you must avoid the ten link building mistakes we are going to share with you below.

Read also, Use these 9 ways to get quality backlinks

It’s understandable, even the most experienced SEOs make some mistakes while building backlinks but you must strive to get quality backlinks so that you can improve:

SalesYour search rankingsYour organic traffic

Remember that building backlinks the wrong way can cost you money and hurt your Google rankings tremendously.

So in this article, we are going to share with you some of the common mistakes to avoid when building backlinks (aka link building mistakes).

But before we get into the link building mistakes to avoid…

Definition of link building

What is Link Building?

Link building is the practice of getting other relevant websites to link to your site. The other definition of link building is… the process of promoting your website to other websites to generate links to your own.

To drive traffic from the search engines, you need to build quality backlinks from relevant websites.

Benefits of Link Building

Did you know that SEO is 90% link building? Oops, we are just guessing because we aren’t professional SEOs but even if you ask the pros, they will tell you that a successful link building strategy can help you to:

Drive referral traffic

Ask the expert SEOs and they will tell you referral traffic is hard to get but is possible when you execute a good link building strategy.

When you secure a link back to your site from relevant authority sites you will increase chances of driving referral traffic to your website. Why?

These sites usually show up when users search for information on the internet. When users click the hyperlinks placed on those websites, they are taken to your website. That’s how you generate referral traffic.

Improve page and domain authority

While Google uses several factors to show up web pages on a search, domain and page authority are important factors that determine whether your websites will show up in the search results.

So how does Google determine Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) of a website?

It’s simple, the quality the backlinks your site has from multiple relevant sites, the higher the domain authority and the better your website will show up on relevant searches. Your Page Authority is the combination of multiple high-quality backlinks to your site.

Improve brand visibility

When executing a link building strategy, website owners promote their websites to other relevant websites through guest posting and several other methods. This way, people get to know about your website and ultimately your brand becomes visible to many people.

Build brand authority

Link building can boost your brand authority in your industry. More and more users are surfing the web in search of useful, educative, interesting, and entertaining content. If you constantly publish high quality and original content, your brand stands out from the crowd. That’s how you build brand authority.

Now, with that being said, let the rubber meet the road.

10 Common Link Building Mistakes to Avoid

1. Publishing Thin Content

Well, most SEOs will tell you to publish link-worthy content but we advise you to publish high-quality content for users and optimize it for search engines.

Unfortunately, many people struggle creating content that ranks better in search engines, but forget to put the readers of the content into considerations- that’s a mistake worth avoiding at all costs.

Google understands when users love your content. The search giant will check how users are interacting and engaging with your content, the backlinks, the shares, the comments, the likes, the time a reader spends on your site, and many other metrics and then rank your site accordingly. That means that if no one is reading your content, then no one is linking to it and hence Google knows your content is thin (sub-par content or poor quality).

Apart from content quality, user experience is also another important factor Google looks at when ranking websites. For instance, if your webpages take too long to open, you will have a high bounce rate.

Focus on creating high-quality and useable content that answers the searchers’ questions and people will link to your website.

Read also, How To Write A Content that Ranks Higher on Google

2. Exchanging Links for Money

Google hates bought links. For this reason, the search engine uses smart bots or crawlers that can detect if you bought links from other sources. Besides, Google allows people to report bought links or PBN networks. To be on the safe side, just avoid buying links.

Even if you game the system by buying links, put this into consideration:

Bought links will drive low-quality traffic than natural linksYou will get a hefty penalty when Google detects paid links in your websiteGetting penalized by Google means you will spend more money to remedy the situation.

Buying links from other sources can hurt your search engine rankings. Therefore, even if you have the money to buy links, you’d better spend it on something else.

3. Forgetting to Get Rid of Toxic Links

First of all, what are toxic links?

Toxic links are those irrelevant or unnatural backlinks that can hurt your website’s search engine rankings.

Now having known what toxic links are, did you hear of Google’s Penguin update?

Don’t worry, we also didn’t know by the time Google was rolling out this “sweet” update but here is why Google rolled out the Penguin update.

Penguin update was released to boost Google’s search results by getting rid of web pages with toxic backlinks.

Penguin update’s main aim is to monitor and penalize websites with tons of toxic backlinks and those with a bad backlink profile.

Getting rid of toxic backlinks is easy. There are plenty of backlink analytics tools such as SEMrush you can use to evaluate your backlink profile and remove toxic backlinks.

4. Focusing on One King of Backlinks

Although a healthy link profile continues to be a powerful indicator of a site’s quality for search engines, many people tend to focus on one type of backlink.

To build a healthy backlink profile, you should invest in a variety of backlinks that drives more traffic to your site and increase revenue.

There are two main backlink types: Dofollow and Nofollow.

Most experienced bloggers and SEOs will tell you to focus on building Dofollow links but this is one of the link building mistakes you should avoid. Focusing on one type of backlink is a bad SEO practice. Besides, your site risks getting penalized by Google for doing that.

Undeniably, Nofollow links don’t pass any link juice to your site but can boost your site’s SEO particularly when they come from different domains.

Try your best to build the two backlink types constantly. For instance, if you build Dofollow backlinks through guest posting, you can also build Nofollow links by commenting on other relevant blogs. Mixing the two links in your backlink profile will help to boost a healthy SEO site.

5. Generating Links from No-Index Domains

As you build backlinks, you should be careful not to obtain links from websites, domains or webpages that aren’t indexed on Google. Google search algorithms penalize sites that get links from pages or sites that aren’t indexed.

Before you get those links from a website, make sure you do enough research to see whether a site is indexed or not. It’s better to spend more time researching a site before you build links from it than to rush building links then regret later.

You can use tools like SEMrush to monitor your backlink profile and if you detect a non-indexed site linking to yours, remove those links.

6. Focusing on Outranking Your Competitor

Sure, it’s good to spy on your competitors’ link profile as this is the best way to know how to beat them but focusing on outranking them by chasing their link profile won’t help you.

As a rule, you should spy on your competitor’s link profile, to see how you can fine-tune your link profile but find resources to develop a content strategy that will help you create your link profile.

7. Building Irrelevant Links

In a bid to build links from authority sites, bloggers and content marketers ignore niche relevancy.

If you own a digital marketing blog, acquiring a backlink from a health and fitness blog is just bad for your SEO.

Unless the blog you are obtaining a link from is general, you should always build links from relevant niches.

Well, it’s possible to build quality links from a blog with a different niche to yours but you should make sure the topic you write about is relevant to your blog.

8. Focusing on Quantity Over Quality

No one stops you from publishing two blog posts per week. However, if you will sacrifice quality for quantity, then just stop doing it.

According to HubSpot, long-form posts generate more shares and backlinks but if the content is poor quality, no one will link to your blog posts.

Always focus on creating and publishing high-quality content and people will link to your content.

9. Not Diversifying Your Link Building Practices

There are plenty of link building practices. The most common ones are guest blogging and blog commenting. If you rely only on one type of link building technique, you won’t get the results you want within the specified time.

10. Hastening Link Building

Google does not limit your speed of building backlinks but generating thousands of links in one day can make Google get suspicious and penalize your website.

Similar to point #8 above, always focus on building quality backlinks than quantity.

That means you are better off getting links from 2 authority sites than getting 20 links from low-quality websites.

Final Words

According to Brian Dean of Backlinko, link building is one of the 200 Google ranking factors. However, link building is a process that takes time and requires patience. Whenever you are executing on a campaign to improve search engine rankings by building links, you should always avoid these ten mistakes.

About The Author

John Trogdon is a professional essay writer and editor for 6 years now. Besides, John has been featured in many authority sites as a professional digital marketer. Forbes calls him a digital marketing wizard. He is also a journalist by profession. Feel free to connect with John on Facebook and LinkedIn.

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