Link Building Mistakes That Hurt Your Website’s SEO

Link building has such an impact that it can make or break your site’s SEO. If you get it right, your site goes way up in search rankings. Get it wrong, however, and the rankings drop, along with your traffic. In some cases, it’s even possible for your site to get penalized or removed from search results.

So, what’s the problem here and how do you get it right? The main issue is that a lot of people think any backlink is good. So, they’ll go for quantity instead of quality and try to find shortcuts that, in theory, should work. But search engines are way too smart for tricks. For instance, Google’s algorithm has come such a long way that it can spot unnatural links, spammy tactics, and bad SEO practices from a mile away.

If you’re thinking of using link building to help your business (and you should), then you need to know what to avoid, so let’s get right into it.

What Not to Do

So, what shouldn’t you do? Well, in all honesty, if you have no knowledge or experience, you really shouldn’t try to do this by yourself, because SEO is complex and it’s very time-consuming. It’s best to hire an agency that’s an expert in white label SEO link building services and let them do all the heavy lifting. If you don’t, you risk hurting your rankings.

But if you kinda sort of know what you’re doing or you really want to DIY it, here’s what you’ll want to avoid.

1. Ignoring Relevance

There are good backlinks and there are not so good ones. If you chase any backlink you can get, you’re making one of the biggest mistakes in backlinking. You only want what’s relevant to your site, nothing else.

Google won’t just look at the amount of backlinks you have, it will check where they come from. If you have backlinks from a totally unrelated site, it will send mixed signals to search engines and it won’t help your authority. For search engines, relevance is a big factor, so go for quality instead of quantity.

2. Overusing Exact Match Anchor Text

Anchor text, which is the clickable text of a hyperlink, has a big part in how search engines understand the content of a link. Of course, using keywords in anchor text will help SEO, but using them too much will backfire. Google’s algorithm sees this as trying to manipulate search rankings, which can result in penalties.

For example, if every backlink to your site uses the phrase “best Teletubby,” it looks unnatural. Instead, use branded terms, generic phrases like “click here,” and descriptive, but still natural language.

3. Relying on Low-Quality Directories

Once upon a time, submitting a website to as many online directories as possible was a great SEO strategy. Then again, once upon a time, people would nibble on arsenic wafers to get brighter eyes and skin. Just like arsenic wafers are a thing of the past, so is relying on low-quality directories.

Low-quality directories either don’t do anything or they hurt your rankings because Google has cracked down on directory link schemes and it will punish you if you use spammy directories for backlinks. Be selective – if a directory will allow pretty much anyone to list their site with no quality control, it’s not worth your time.

4. Buying Links from the Wrong Sources

Buying backlinks seems like an easy way to help your rankings, but if you’re not very careful, it will only do harm. Google explicitly warns against buying links that pass PageRank and if you’re caught engaging in link schemes, you’ll be severely penalized. The riskiest thing you can do is buy links from low-quality sellers who use link farms, PBNs, and spammy automated tactics. There’s no value in these links and it can even cause Google to deindex your site.

If you don’t want to risk penalties, focus on guest blogging and outreach-based link building.

5. Neglecting Internal Linking

External backlinks are very powerful, but don’t overlook internal links. Internal links help search engines understand what the structure of your website is like and distribute link authority across your pages. If there’s no solid internal linking strategy, some of your important pages won’t have links pointing to them. This means that search engines will have a harder time crawling and indexing them.

Make sure to link relevant pages naturally within your content and use descriptive anchor text to guide users to resources they’ll find useful.

Conclusion

It seems like you’ll get penalized if you take one step in the wrong direction and, as dramatic as that sounds, it’s true. But when you really think about it, all you need to do is follow some ethical practices and go about earning backlinks the right way. That means – time and effort. No shortcuts and no sketchy behavior.

It’s hard work, but it pays off big time.