Before you start building backlinks for your website, you should find out how to do it correctly. Read this article to get to know about most common mistakes and ways of avoiding them!
In 2022, backlinks remain a powerful tool for boosting your website’s authority and driving traffic to it. However, when building backlinks, site owners tend to make errors. In this article, we’ll list the most frequent mistakes and will help you to avoid them.
Buy Links from Low-Authority Sources
Search engine crawlers can easily detect websites that buy or sell links. Consequently, the positions of these sites in search engine rankings might deteriorate. Google users can report toxic links obtained through a PBN building service or sold by directories.
Do you remember the Google Page Rank algorithm? When it was introduced, bloggers got very happy. They began to buy cheap links from external sources, which generated a lot of spam. That’s why Google got rid of Page Rank.
Today, experienced marketers know how to purchase links from safe high-authority sources. Such an approach won’t involve any penalties for your website. What you should avoid doing is buying random links from sites that you hardly know.
Leave Toxic Links in Your Backlink Profile
A backlink is characterized as toxic if it’s irrelevant and unnatural. It can harm your website’s position in search engine results. Google enhanced its Penguin algorithms to penalize pages with toxic backlinks.
To improve your backlink profile, you should employ tools such as Semrush. They will enable you to detect unwanted links. Then, remove these links using the Disavow tool by Google.
Rely Exclusively on Dofollow or Nofollow Links
Nofollow links fail to provide any link juice to your keywords or pages. They don’t influence the positions of your website in search engine results. But if you employ only dofollow links, Google might penalize you.
The ideal way out is to use nofollow links in comments and their dofollow counterparts in articles, blog posts and other types of lengthy texts. Such an approach will give your website a considerable SEO boost.
Build Links from No-Index Pages or Domains
Use the above-mentioned Semrush or other similar tools to detect no-indexed or malicious web pages and remove them from your backlink portfolio. If you don’t do it, Google might or might not penalize you. It would be wiser to play safe.
Use Optimized Anchor Text
Let’s imagine that you want to promote a website that offers mobile app development services. It would be a mistake to:
- Use the “mobile app development services” as you anchor
- Place the same anchor on all websites that provide backlinks to yours
That would be classified as a black hat SEO strategy and lead to penalties. Search engines would perceive your actions as spamming.
Instead, think of unique anchors for each web page. Let these anchors be relevant to mobile app development but not consist of these words exclusively.
Get Site-Wide Links or Footer Section Links
The links to your website should be placed in articles but not in the sidebar or footer of the recipient site. Besides, it would be reasonable to stay away from site-wide links. Some time ago, marketers used to love this strategy for the quick SEO benefits that it brought. Today, search engines disapprove of it because it makes links look unnatural.
Build Irrelevant Links
It’s crucial that websites where you place your links are relevant to the niche that your site belongs to. You shouldn’t be guided only by the high ranking of the recipient website. If the theme of the recipient website doesn’t fully coincide with yours, try to find some touch points with it.
Build Links Too Quickly
When a marketer builds hundreds of backlinks in one day, that would look suspicious. The right tactic is to create a relatively small number of links every week but do it consistently. One backlink on a high-authority website will help you better than a dozen links on low-authority sources.
Provide Links That Lead Exclusively to Your Home Page
If all the backlinks to your website lead to your home page, Google will regard it as artificial. Create links to other pages to improve their positions in search engine rankings. For instance, you may refer to pages from your product catalog when talking about industry trends. Alternatively, if you create a guest post with a tutorial for a third-party website, add a link there to another tutorial from your website.
Post Backlinks on Websites That Feature Hundreds of Outgoing Links
It might happen so that a third-party website publishes an article and this text becomes very popular. Readers will leave a lot of comments under the post, sharing links to other resources. You might be tempted to join the discussion and leave the link to your website too. But that would be a low-quality link. Besides, it will get lost in the avalanche of information.
Create Content That Is Not Worth Linking
Website owners who create valuable and informative content get a lot of natural backlinks. People eagerly share these articles on social networks and send links to them to their friends. You may either outsource professional writers or compose such content yourself. Tutorials and how-to’s are always relevant. Browse social platforms and forums to find out which problems users tend to discuss the most actively and try to offer solutions to their pain points.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, that was an informative read and now you better understand which mistakes to avoid when building a backlink portfolio for your website. You should avoid buying links from low-authority sources, leaving toxic links in your backlink profile and relying exclusively on dofollow or nofollow links. Other common mistakes are building links from no-index pages or domains and using optimized anchor text as well as getting site-wide links or footer section links. It doesn’t make sense to build irrelevant links, build links too quickly or provide links that lead exclusively to your home page. It would be smart to stay away from websites that feature hundreds of outgoing links and never create content that doesn’t deserve to be shared. If you avoid these errors, you’ll be likely to succeed in your backlink building strategy.