Link Building: Techniques to Avoid | XpertPosting
Many link building strategies can backfire, causing more harm than good.
If you want to improve your rankings in the long run using what we call a white hat SEO strategy, you should definitely avoid risky link building tactics.
In this article, we will talk about dangerous link building strategies that will only harm your site’s rankings
Stay tuned!
Risky Link Building Practices
There used to be one simple rule about link building. The more backlinks a site gets, the higher its ranking.
Ever since Google released the Penguin algorithm, this tactic has become dangerous.
If your strategy is related to spam, you run the risk of being filtered by search engines and subject to sanctions.
Posting a huge number of links without a proven strategy and getting low-quality links will only harm your site’s ranking.
The don’ts of Link-Building
- Do not buy a lot of links:
You don’t have to worry about the number of backlinks you get for your site if they are from high domain authority resources.
Still, getting too many backlinks at once can harm your website. Your backlink portfolio dynamic should evolve smoothly and consistently.
- Avoid link exchange:
Link exchange helps, but it’s better to use one-way links. Link exchanges provide significantly less link juice compared to one-way links.
Personally, I think it’s better to improve your site’s content and make it more user-friendly to get one-way links than to spend time exchanging links. It’s not worth it.
In addition, Google states that exchanging links is against the rules.
They can algorithmically determine the most obvious link exchanges and either ignore links from those exchanges or, in particularly obvious cases, penalize both sites.
- Do not spam on forums and blogs:
Forum link building and blog commenting are quite effective link-building techniques, but if you spam on forums and blogs, you won’t get any SEO benefits.
First, most of your comments and replies will be deleted. But even if they stay alive, links from spammy platforms will only hurt your rankings.
So, how to do it right?
- Find relevant platforms
- Post organic, helpful, and informative replies that will benefit the users.
Even though it seems simple, applying forum link building and blog commenting is quite difficult. Most SEOs and website owners choose to hire specialized forum link-building agencies.
- Don’t use automatic link building systems:
We do not recommend you use any tools for automated link building. Most of these tools, check only a limited credibility and quality score.
Although, you can use an automated tool for link building, manually check all those links, domain score, spam score, relevancy, and other SEO metrics.
Remove toxic and suspicious links.
- Avoid off-topic guest blogging:
The secret to successful guest blogging lies in writing posts that are of great interest to the host blog’s readers and are closely related to your niche.
Backlinks from resources that are not related to your niche will not help either in terms of marketing or SEO.
- Avoid over-optimized anchor text:
Having too many backlinks with overly optimized anchor text will negatively impact your rankings.
Google filters will detect that you are trying to spam the system. This will increase the likelihood of penalization.
It is critical to have a varied selection of anchor texts and at least 80% of non-anchor backlinks.
- Don’t link only to the homepage:
Links should lead to different pages of your site, and not just to the main one.
If all backlinks lead to the homepage, it looks unnatural.
Besides, you need page authority for each page, not just for your home page.
Of course, if someone is talking about your brand, you need a link to your homepage.
- Don’t post the same content on different sites:
Another way to get links is to write articles, guest posts about your company and products and try to publish it on various sites.
In no case should you publish the same articles on different sites!
Even if you rearrange a few sentences and replace a couple of words, the articles will still be considered duplicated.
Distributing content does not create new content. This is just a ploy that can work against you.
Write articles for the audience of the site where you want to send your content.
Yes, it takes a lot of effort. No one said link building is easy, but it’s better to avoid it than using spam techniques.
- Keep a balance of no-follow and do-follow links:
It is recommended to maintain a good balance of do-follow and no-follow backlinks.
Why?
Even though no-follow backlinks do not directly affect SEO, they have various indirect benefits and are critical to making your backlink portfolio look natural and organic.
It would be unnatural if all your links were do-follow.
We recommend getting at least 25% no-follow links.
However, it would be better to analyze your competitor’s backlink profile to determine the best match.
What types of backlinks will be effective in 2022-2023?
Traditionally, anchor links from powerful thematic sites work best. They will also steer in 2022-2023.
But getting links from quality resources is expensive, so you should get a variety of backlinks and apply complex SEO.
Also, keep in mind that getting too many backlinks in a short period of time will only hurt your rankings.
Recommended reading: How To Rank Your Website In Google.
Conclusion:
We all know that there are many link building techniques that can be applied to get high-quality backlinks. But you should be aware of the link building mistakes that can ultimately harm your site.
The purpose of writing this guide is to warn you to stay away from risky link building practices and increase rankings and search traffic of your sites.
Do you make any of these mistakes, and what other common backlink mistakes do you often see? Share your thoughts in the comments below.