Link Building Mistakes to Avoid

Most of the digital marketing experts and SEO specialists suggest bloggers the development of the perfect link building strategy. Everyone knows what role backlinks play in search engine optimization. When you design a website and put content in it, your goal is to get a large number of visitors to your blog. Before you decide the ways to gain the trust of your visitors and convert them into your customers, you have to boost the traffic to your blog. A link building company called ClickSlice states that driving organic traffic to the blog is the first step to building the trust of users.

You might have heard of backlinks in SEO. The simplest definition of backlinks is getting a link pointing to your online blog. Link building strategies play a crucial part in off-page SEO optimization. Google itself says it is hard for the search engine to rank a website that does not have backlinks. In the early days, people would do anything to obtain a large number of backlinks. But that’s not the case today. The quality of the backlinks you earn matter more than the quantity. So, here we’re presenting the top link building mistakes that every blogger should avoid:

1. Linking to low-quality websites

Sometimes, people aren’t familiar with the sites they are linking to. They place a link to a spam site or duplicate blogs unintentionally. This is where you are committing a mistake. As mentioned above, you do not just need backlinks. You need high-quality backlinks. Before you place links to a website (probably in the hope that they will link back to you), don’t forget to conduct research on the website and check it thoroughly. It is worth to note that Google does not support websites with duplicate content, illegal sites, spam blogs, etc. That being said, linking to spam content can have a negative impact on your website. Similarly, don’t accept backlinks from illegal websites.

2. Buying or Selling Backlinks

If you know the current Google Algorithm, you would know how Google penalizes the websites that engage in backlinks buying and selling the business. Of course, the easiest way of getting backlinks to your page is purchasing them. But you believe it or not; Google has strictly prohibited links trading. This is no more an era where you can purchase a few backlinks and make it to the top page of the search engine. A small mistake can result in a heavy penalty (even account suspension). Search engines want natural and quality backlinks. They consider backlinks as votes (and needless to say, paying to earn votes is illegal). The more natural your backlink is, the higher the ranking your website gets.

With millions of websites on search engines, it is not easy for new bloggers to keep on publishing content in the hope that they will earn a backlink someday. That’s why they choose spam ways to collect backlinks and rank their websites. However, there are plenty of other ways for getting quality backlinks such as guest posting, participating in forums, giving testimonials to the companies, etc.

3. Not removing Toxic Backlinks from your website

Have you heard of Google’s Penguin update? Penguin updates were specifically developed by Google to provide a secure and reliable platform to the users and businesses by penalizing and suspending the website with toxic backlinks. Now, what are toxic backlinks? Any unnatural and irrelevant link that is pointing to your web page is considered toxic backlink by Google. You might not even notice, but these unnatural backlinks can impact the search engine ranking of your website to a great extent. In short, Penguin update was designed to remove the web pages from Google that have too many unnatural backlinks together with a bad link-building profile. The question is how to ensure that your site is free from such backlinks? If not, what action should you take to remove such backlinks from your profile?

There are several SEO backlink tools that can inform you about all the links that point to your site. Once you have identified the backlinks, you can use Google’s Disavow tool to remove such links from your page.

4. Building Links from no-index Pages

Apart from illegal and spam websites, Google does not appreciate the web pages that build a link from the domains that are not indexed on search engines. If you try to earn links from such websites (no matter if knowingly or unknowingly), your site is at higher risk of getting penalized by Google. If you want to stay safe, avoid accepting from and linking to the non-indexed domains.

Tips: It is not possible to ascertain which non-index page links to your website. Hence, you must use the SEO tools such as SEMrush to monitor all your backlinks and ensure that all the links to your page are valid and not coming from spam or non-indexed website.

5. Stuffing the anchor text with keywords

This is one of the most common yet invalid backlink strategies for bloggers. Do you think the search engines will rank your content that is stuffed with keywords? Well, Google has declared unnecessary keyword stuffing as a black hat SEO strategy. You cannot expect to get ranking for your site on the search engines by inserting the unnecessary keyword in the anchor text or web content. People even use the keywords stuffed anchor text for link building. As a result, their account is penalized by Google.

When you write content or create URL’s and anchor text, keep in mind that you are writing for users, not search engines. The users won’t trust you and visit your site if they don’t get useful and informative content in it.

There are constant changes in the SEO algorithm of Google. This is because the main objective of Google is to provide a fair and authentic platform to the customers as well as website owners (that are trying their best to optimize their content for better ranking). However, one thing that has not changed in years is the Backlinks. Backlinks will always remain an important element of the algorithm. Remember to follow a proper link building strategy that meets the requirement of Google’s SEO algorithm.