Common Link Building Mistakes YOU Could Be Making
Backlinks are a big player in the world of SEO, a solid link building strategy is a staple part in building your brand awareness and your rankings. Whilst they can do wonders for building your organic position, if not implemented correctly, can cause more harm than good. That’s why we’re here! Check out these top link building mistakes YOU could be making.
Buying Your Backlinks
The likes of Google condemn purchasing your backlinks and is a direct violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This practice alongside many other bad SEO practices was very common back in the early days of SEO. Since then Google has made many changes to their guidelines and algorithms, prioritizing the importance of improving the users experience. Backlinks are there to enrich the user journey through adding to their search and providing them with more information relevant to the subject matter.
Some SEOs do still try this sneaky tactic and probably will continue for the foreseeable future, but doing so does come at a cost, a cost that often results in a penalty.
Too Many Link Exchanges
When you link directly back to sites that are linking to you, Google sees this as a link exchange. A link exchange is when two brands/two websites have an agreement to link to one another in an effort to boost their SEO. To clear things up, having SOME reciprocal links isn’t always bad and can be a natural occurrence when sites have built some form of rapport with one another. In these instances it’s important that the links read naturally and make sense within the content.
However unnatural link exchanges can result in a manual penalty or can be algorithmically ignored and therefore not contribute to your SEO at all.
Acquiring Backlinks From Spam Sites
When spam sites or sites that Google would view as untrustworthy link to you, this can harm your SEO. A common, consistent mistake made by site owners is neglecting to manage who is linking to them before it’s too late.
Fortunately your backlinks can be easily monitored and assessed through tools like Google Search Console, MOZ, Ahrefs and SE Rankings to name a few. In the instance a spammy site is linking to you, the best approach to take would be contacting the site owner and asking them to remove that link. If this fails and you feel this specific backlink has the potential to harm your SEO, you can use the link disavow tool within Search Console. However, this should be a last resort and you should always try and get the link removed yourself first.
Over Optimising Your Anchor Text
Anchor text is the visible, clickable text in your hyperlink. Anchor text plays an important part in SEO, keyword relevant anchor text lets Google and the user know what the linked article is about. However, it is possible to over optimize your backlinks, doing this can cause more harm than good.
What does it mean to over optimize your anchor text?
There are different types of anchor text, these are:
Exact Match
This is when your anchor text matches the keyword exactly. For example, let’s say your most recent post links to a page about wedding planning, exact match anchor text would display as “wedding planning.”
Partial Match
Partial match is when your anchor text contains elements of the keyword on the page you are linking to. If we take the above wedding planning example, a partial match variation of this would be “wedding planning tips.”
Branded
This is when you use a brand name as your anchor text link.
Naked Link
A naked link is when your anchor text is the URL you are linking to.
Generic
Generic anchor text is when you use generic words for your link such as “click here” or “read more.”
Images
This one is sort of obvious, but this is when you link to another site using an image.
By excessively using exact match anchor text on a regular basis, you are actually over optimising in the eyes of Google, which can hurt your rankings. To prevent this, it’s best to avoid over optimisation by ensuring your anchor text isn’t overly keyword heavy, whilst also avoiding the generic “click here” text.
Linking Too Much
Linking to other sites is great, however too much is never a good thing. Over linking on your pages can cause Google to perceive your site as spammy and therefore not prioritise you organically. When it comes to link building, quality is far better than quantity. Not only in the eyes of Google but also in the eyes of the user. Instead of oversaturating your pages with links, focus on implementing fewer links that truly matter and link to a page of high relevance/quality.
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