8 Link-Building Mistakes You Should Avoid at All Costs

Link building is a rewarding practice that should be a part of every SEO strategy. It is one of the most crucial activities that help drive organic traffic consistently to your website. However, it works only when you follow the right ways to acquire backlinks. To ensure your link-building efforts do not end up hurting your website’s ranking and reputation, you need to avoid these common mistakes:

1. Buying Links

There are plenty of websites that pay other sites for links, hoping that it would improve their website’s search engine ranking. This practice is highly frowned upon among SEO practitioners and is often considered a black hat technique as you are trying to manipulate search engine algorithms. It is better to hire a digital marketing agency that can help you build a proper link-building strategy and improve your search engine rankings with white hat practices.

2. Focusing Only on Homepage Links

If you are solely focused on building links to the homepage of your website, you need to change this habit. There is no denying that homepages are important. However, you should not neglect the link-building potential your other web pages have. By focusing only on the homepage links, you are missing opportunities to rank those pages in search engine results pages (SERP). Moreover, this tells the search engine that your website does not have much depth or relevance. You should also consider implementing internal linking strategies to establish relationships between different pages on your site.

3. Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality

Preferring the number of backlinks over the quality of each backlink can cost your website in the long run. It is a misconception that getting more links to your website will help you get higher rankings in the SERPs. However, that is not the way link-building works. Low-quality links can negatively impact your website’s reputation and authority. In the past few years, search engines have gotten a lot smarter and can easily identify spammy links. Instead of getting irrelevant backlinks that can send wrong signals to search engines, you should invest more time and effort to get quality links from high-authority sites.

4. Using Exact Match Anchor Text Repeatedly

Google often looks at the overuse of exact-match anchor text as a tactic to manipulate search rankings. This practice refers to the repeated use of the same text to link back to your site on different web pages. Focusing on one specific keyword sends a wrong signal to the search engine. Instead of doing that, you should consider diversifying your anchor text to include a number of variations of your main keywords as well as the branded keywords. This does not raise any red flags and helps you create a natural backlink profile. You should also try to target a broader range of keywords and attract more relevant traffic to the website.

5. Neglecting Relevance

Linking to websites not remotely related to your niche or industry will confuse your audience. As they start leaving your site, you will see a spike in your website’s bounce rate. Search engines also penalize websites that link to irrelevant content. Always pay attention to the context and content of the website you are trying to link to. The relevance also matters a lot while deciding the anchor text. If you use an unrelated phrase to link to another website, it may appear like spam and can affect your website’s reputation.

6. Not Removing Toxic Links

Toxic links refer to backlinks that are unnatural and irrelevant to the content, affecting the site’s search engine rankings. Since Google’s Penguin update came into effect, Google has started removing the web pages with toxic backlinks from the search results to improve user experience. If your website has some of those toxic links, it will be difficult for you to get a better rank on the SERPs. There are several backlink analysis tools that help you identify toxic backlinks and remove them from your pages.

7. Building Links from No-Index Pages

When a website or page is not indexed on Google, getting backlinks from those pages or websites can negatively impact your ranking. Google search algorithms usually penalize sites with backlinks from such no-index pages or domains. You should keep an eye on your backlink profile and avoid such backlinks to stay in the good books of Google search results. Backlink analysis tools can help you identify such links if you unknowingly add them to your website.

8. Building Too Many Links Too Quickly

Google has no specific rule on how fast you should build links. However, if you build thousands of links in just a few days, Google may start penalizing your site. As mentioned above, it is always recommended to build high-quality links instead of getting links from sites with low domain authority. A couple of backlinks from high-DA websites are way more useful than twenty low-quality backlinks. 

Conclusion

Link building is like a double-edged sword. If done correctly, it can help you conquer the world of search engine rankings. At the same time, it can neutralize all your efforts and harm your website reputation if you fall for the black-hat link-building practices. Even though you are now aware of the most common link-building mistakes, you should keep yourself updated about the latest changes in Google’s algorithm and how it ranks websites on its SERPs.