Buying backlinks. Don't make these 7 mistakes.

Intro

Link building is one of the most important aspects of ranking websites. No matter how much effort you put into creating user-friendly and information-rich content, you will hardly get any traffic if it's not getting links from relevant sites. But when building links, many SEOs start sweating because one mistake can lead to all the SEO efforts going in vain.

Google keeps rolling out algorithm updates to tackle lousy SEO practices; therefore, it is essential to know the proper techniques that will not only help you grow organic traffic but also sustain the rankings.

Moreover, manually building links can be a neck-breaking task when you have a portfolio of dozens of sites; therefore, SEOs end up buying backlinks from resellers, which is not a bad practice, but you need to keep caution while doing this.

Hence, we are writing this guide to help you pick the sites from where you want a link. Make sure you read till the end.

Avoiding link farms

Some websites are created just for selling links, often publishing more guest posts and no helpful content for users. These sites have many OBL, that is, outbound links, often considered spammy.

Sometimes, bloggers buy an expired domain with a good backlink profile, which is used to sell backlinks; such domains can easily pass link juice, but if it is linking back to too many sites in a short time, things can go wrong.

Therefore, avoid taking links from such sites because Google keeps a check on sites that exist only for selling paid links and sends them a manual penalty, which can also affect your site. You can check the outbound backlinks of a site using tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush and find out if the site is selling too many links.

Irrelevant to your niche

Suppose you want to build links for an e-com store that deals in pet toys. Taking links from sites in home, law, and sports niches will never help in the long run. Google wants you to get links from sites that are closely relevant to your business; however, there are some exceptions.

For instance, if your client’s e-com store sells a dog toy, that’s a fine example of a new invention toy industry. You'll surely benefit if you link that product page to technology niche sites that cover such innovations.

That’s called page relevancy, which is kind of an exception. Now let’s take an example of unfair practice.

Suppose a reseller pitches you a home improvement niche site that has no connection to dogs and toys, but is the high authority with millions of monthly users. If you acquire a link from this site, you might get link juice, but the day Google identifies irrelevancy, you’ll see a major drop in rankings.

Choosing trusted link sellers

If you ever check your spam folder, you’ll only see emails from a billionaire who wants to donate his life savings to you or link builders who have DA 70 sites for just $5. The best thing you can do about this is to avoid them.

Yes, you don’t have to buy links from such sites because they have manipulated metrics, and taking a link from them can put you in trouble; therefore, if you don’t have time to set up a link-building outreach campaign, buy links from marketplaces like OutreachMantra, that have trusted and verified sites directly added by the site owners (publishers).

It offers a set of filters that help you choose a site that you want. You can filter sites according to DA, traffic, niche, and more. Moreover, the turnaround time is comparatively lesser than the other platforms, and the instructions you give are followed.

Once you buy links from OutreachMantra, use a backlink monitor tool to ensure your links are not changed to dofollow, and the anchor text remains the same. If you find any of these happening, contact marketplace support and inform them about it.

Avoid comment & directory links

There was a time when agencies used to pay money for building comments and directory links, and then the penguin update happened. If you are a decade old in the SEO industry, you must be aware of the spammy techniques SEOs used to implement for ranking sites. But some SEOs still think this works and keep building hundreds of spammy comments and directory links on random blogs. If you are one of them, immediately stop this practice, especially on your client’s website. Such backlinks are not helpful and only give a spam signal to Google, which can tank down your site.

However, talking about link juice, comment links do contribute a bit, but you cannot rely only on comment backlinks for ranking. You can make comment links for tier link building in a limit, which helps to increase the page rank of the links you made on high authority sites.

Let me explain this with an example:

Suppose I acquire a link from https://example.com/demopage; now, since this page has no page rank because it is new, you can create a few comment links and forum links on https://example.com/demopage to pass link juice on it. This link juice will then pass on to your page that you link to the “demopage” and help improve the rankings.

Always track SERP of the keyword you are working for. This helps you conclude whether your link-building practice is showing negative or positive results.

Don’t over-optimize the anchors

Did someone tell you to use the primary keyword as the anchor text for all the links you make? If yes, then please stop doing it right now.

Over optimization action can surely invite a manual penalty, and to avoid this, don’t keep the anchor text similar for all the links.

There are several types of anchor texts:

1. Branded
2. Exact-match
3. Partial match
4. Naked URLs
5. Generic
6. Image anchors

This guide by Moz will help you understand this in depth. It is recommended to analyze the backlinks of the top 10 results before deciding on the anchor texts for your link building campaigns, but remember not to follow them blindly.

Outsourcing because the reviews are good

5-star ratings can be manipulated easily to trap new customers. This is a common practice in the SEO industry; you need to be smart to identify this. Many SEOs, while outsourcing link-building projects, often avoid deep analysis of the samples of the person they are outsourcing the work to and trust them based on 5-star ratings from previous clients.

Some freelance link builders use automated softwares for building links, which can eventually result in spammy link building, harming your site’s search visibility. Since they have hundreds of orders to complete, don’t expect them to build each link manually.

To select the right person for this job, make sure they know:

• The correct ratio of using anchors
• How to find relevant/related pages for link building
• How to place a link naturally with pre-text and post-text

PBNs

PBNs, i.e., Private Blogging Networks, are one of the highly debatable link-building tactics, and honestly speaking, digital marketing Gurus themselves claim to use PBNs to rank their sites.

But there’s a catch!

Digital marketing gurus who suggest you use PBNs often tell you to build your own network rather than buying links from random PBN resellers. There’s a lot of difference between buying and building, so let me explain this in detail.

If you are taking links from PBN, it is crucial to avoid leaving footprints because if Google catches any, you are DOOMED! You shouldn’t host PBNs on the same hosting; the domains should not be on the same account or share the same IP, or DNS and should not be logged in from the same IP.

If you are buying PBNs from a reseller, none of those mentioned above will be shared with you, so it will be like hitting a target wearing a blindfold. That’s riskier than building 1000 comment links. Not kidding.

Therefore, the correct practice is to build your self-managed PBNs, avoiding footprints and not selling links from those PBNs to anyone but using them for ranking your sites.

(Image source: seekahost.com)

Bottom Line - Should you buy backlinks or not?

Concluding this article with the commonly asked question, my answer to this will be, IT DEPENDS! Because building links is time-consuming, if you start creating links from 10 clients manually, you’ll end up quitting SEO.

You need to understand the types of links you need to buy vs those you can build manually. Sponsored posts can be purchased from marketplaces, while forum links can be made on your own.