3 Worst Link Building Mistakes to Avoid in Your SEO Campaigns

Intro

Link building is the difference between ranking in the top 3 positions or having your well-written blog post decay in the second and third pages of Google. Although most content teams acknowledge the importance of link building, they often make many mistakes that are counterproductive to their SEO campaigns. These mistakes can often harm your SEO and it might be better to avoid it altogether. In this post, we’ll cover three of the most prominent mistakes made when doing link building. Make sure to avoid these to maximize your rankings for your keywords.

1. Low quality links:

The first and most prominent mistake content teams make in their SEO campaigns is building low quality links. Low quality links can come in several forms and they either do little to nothing or they can harm your rankings. These include:

• Spammy directory links: Links from low-quality directories that exist solely for the purpose of link building can harm your site's credibility and authority.
• Paid links: purchasing links from websites solely for the purpose of boosting your site's ranking is against Google's guidelines and can result in penalties.
• Irrelevant or unrelated Links: Links from websites that are not relevant to your niche or industry can signal to search engines that your site lacks authority in its field.
• Link farms: Networks of websites created for the sole purpose of linking to each other can be easily identified by search engines and can result in penalties.
• Article directories and press releases: While these tactics were once common in SEO, links from article directories and press releases are often seen as low quality and can have little to no impact on your site's rankings.

Incorporating any of these low quality links does far more harm than good for your campaigns. Not only will Google recognize this and decrease your rankings, other sites will also recognize your site as one that gets links from poor sites and they won’t link to you. When doing link building, it’s common for editors to take a look at your spam score, link profile and other metrics to decide if they should link to any of your resources.

Over the long term, all of these links will come back to hinder your progress and they won’t build your authority. Instead of taking the right and steady approach to link building, sites that use these shortcuts often have a hard time building links in the future. It may take a few extra months to do link building correctly, but it will pay for itself as you continue to rank competitively while the sites that engage in this get a manual penalty and decreased rankings.

A few signs that you shouldn’t get a link from a website include:

• Excessive pop-up ads
• Massive changes in the backlink profile in a short amount of time
• Suspicious looking domain names
• Low quality/thin content across the website

2. Ignoring internal links

One of the most common mistakes link builders make when doing SEO campaigns is ignoring internal links. It’s so easy to measure the impact of external links because your domain rating can go up, a specific page might get higher rankings, etc. This often causes many people to forget the importance of internal links. Internal links are links from your website than link to other specific pages on your site. For example, if you’re writing about link building and you have another blog post about SEO, a link to that post in your link building post would be considered an internal link.

2. Internal links are particularly important because they:

• Give Google an understanding of how your site is structured: internal links allow search engines to understand the content hierarchy on your page. This helps search engines crawl and index pages properly.
• They can pass link authority from one page to another: If you have a high ranking page, a link from that page can dramatically improve the rankings of one of your service pages or lower ranking pages
• Improve navigation: internal links help users find other pages on your website by connecting similar pages to each other. This can help users stay longer on your site and improve your SEO

The first step in maximizing the ROI of using internal links is to follow best practices. If the posts in your website are lacking internal links, that’s the first thing you should do. As a general rule of thumb, it’s good to have 3-5 internal links per blog post. Use these links to point to any relevant post in your blog. Once you’ve made sure you have sufficient internal links on all of your posts, you can start prioritizing internal links for your priority posts.

If you’re doing internal link building, every page is not worth the same. The pages you have where there’s more traffic can pass on a lot more link authority than other pages. This is why you need to prioritize linking to your top pages from these high-traffic posts. Doing this along with building external links gives you the best chance of improving the rankings for any desired keyword.

3. Over-optimizing on the anchor:

Anchor text can drastically influence the impact of your link building. Your anchor text is the clickable text in the hyperlink. This helps indicate to search engines what the description of the page you’re linking to is. For example, Split My Fare is the anchor text for the link in this sentence. If I were to use an exact match anchor, it would be the URL of the link in that instance.

In general, the anchor text should be as natural as possible, similar to when a normal user links to a resource. When the anchor is over-optimized, it’s usually a sign that someone manually did it. If Google picks up on multiple links that were over-optimized, they can decrease your ranking despite the work that you did to get those links. These become a much larger issue as your site grows because you’ll need to heavily diversify your anchors if you over optimized them early on.

There are several best practices you should be following for anchor texts. These will help you avoid over-optimization.

• Short: You should not link an entire sentence for your anchor. In general 1-4 words is more than enough for the average anchor text. A few longer ones may not hurt you, but too many will indicate you’re manually manipulating these links.
• Mix up your anchors: You shouldn’t have exact anchors for all your links. Exact match anchors also indicate manual manipulation of links. You should be able to throw in a few words between your anchor words and that should be enough to diversify your anchor text.
• Use partial match anchors: Instead of a completely identical anchor, add 1-2 words from your desired anchor and incorporate the rest naturally in your link. This should help you avoid keyword stuffing that can hurt your rankings
• Relevant: The anchor you use should be relevant to the page you’re linking to. Using an anchor text that does not match will hurt your rankings in addition to confusing your reader

Neil Patel, one of the most accomplished SEOs, recommends that the keyword you’re trying to rank for shouldn’t be more than 10% of your anchor links. In general, the anchor texts should be diversified, so it looks as natural as possible. Below are two examples that shows the difference between an over optimized anchor and a natural anchor

As you can see, nearly half of the anchors for this site are trying to rank for the primary keyword. This is extremely concerning and they’re likely going to get hit with a penalty. Search engines will view this as manual manipulation and it can destroy all the good work you’ve done over years.

In contrast, this example has diversified anchors:

As you can see Moz has an extremely diversified anchor base. Along with its branded name, there are a lot of great resources they have that people link to. Their content catalog along with their good PR allows them to have many links that point to their homepage and across their blog posts.

The difference between the anchors for these two sites is night and day. Search engines are far more likely to boost the rankings of the latter because it’s a much more natural website. Of course, Moz manually builds links, but they do it in a manner that is not overtly manipulative and search engines reward them for that.

For your website, just make sure that your anchors are diversified and you’re not using exact match anchors and that’s a good start. A good example of this is StickerBros.com, a custom printing site. As you can see their anchor text is diversified:

There’s multiple links with the URL, multiple with the brand name and several with their products they offer. This is a natural anchor variation and will perform much better than exact match anchors. As long as you keep your anchor texts as natural as possible, you’ll avoid Google penalties and your content will rank relatively well.

To sum up, these are just a few link building mistakes you should avoid to increase the ROI of your SEO campaigns. Although these short-sighted methods might be enticing to try, it ultimately results in brand damage and long-term loss for your business. It’s best to approach things consistently and thoroughly and your SEO campaigns will take care of itself as it compounds over time.