Common Mistakes when Link Building

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 by Sam

Linked building is the most important technique for SEO. It helps in bringing traffic to your site and quality links help in getting good results with search engines. However, in the process of link building, people commit some mistakes that should be avoided.

Some common mistakes are:

  • Link exchange without any research
    Exchanging links with sites in your niche can be quite valuable for your website. However, it is of no use to exchange links with every site even if they rank well or receive a lot of traffic. They should be related to the content of your site and add some value to the information that is already being shared with your website visitors. If you exchange links with sites on any topic, search engines might punish you and the traffic that you will receive will be of low quality as people would not be interested in what your site has to offer.
  • The more the merrier
    This doesn’t apply to link building. It would not be of much use if your site has a lot of backlinks from websites that don’t have a PR or ranking in search engines. So, quality over quantity applies here. You should concentrate on building links with quality sites.
  • Irrelevant anchor text
    If it is possible for you to select the anchor text, mostly include good keywords rather than irrelevant keywords or website names. It is ok to sometimes include your website name as the anchor text just for making your website popular and brand-building but it should not be a regular practice.
  • Majority of home page links
    Another common mistake is to build links in such a way that they only link to the home page of the site. This will do a lot of good for the home page but other pages would be neglected. Your strategy should be to get maximum number of pages indexed in search engines. The home page is a general page for your website and other pages provide more specific information. So, it would be nice if visitors land directly at the other pages as well.
  • Most of the links coming from a single website/IP address
    This should be avoided as search engines don’t consider this as a part of natural link building process.
  • No outbound links
    Search engines expect sites to link to authority sites and they consider this as a good sign. So, outbound links to authority sites will work well for the overall quality of your website.
  • Building thousands of links in a short span of time
    Some people use software to build links through blackhat methods. These may produce some high quality links quickly and the website may get good initial results, however, search engines would soon come to know about the technique you are using on your website and the site would be penalized or banned from search engines. So, you should not build an unnatural number of links in a short time.

If you keep the above tips in mind and avoid committing such mistakes, your website will grow slowly and organically and search engines will trust your site and content and over time this will result in excellent rankings.

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