One of the most common SEO tip which all SEO guru’s give you is building backlinks and avoid common link building mistakes.
We have already shared 101 ways to build backlinks and now it’s time to know some mistakes which we often make in our link building campaign.
Especially, if you are a blogger and work as an individual, it’s always a good idea to use any tool to maintain your backlink building campaign.
Link Building plays an important role in Search Engine Optimization, eespecially in Off-Page Optimization.
There are many link building techniques that help to get backlinks to our site. Note that If you want to rank well in search engines, you don’t need just backlinks – you need quality backlinks.
It is very common that many people unknowingly make some most common mistakes while building backlinks, which can get you good ranking as well as negative rankings (in some cases). So below are the few link building mistakes that you should always take care of:
Common link Building mistakes:
Linking to sites with bad reputation:
Never ever link to a site that had bad reputation i.e., spam site, duplicate content site (auto-blogging, illegal sites, porn sites).
Remember that search engines certainly won’t love those sites and yours too if you link to them. Similarly, getting backlinks from bad sites like porn and gambling sites should be avoid.
Most of the time, competitive SEO companies uses this technique to bring negative SEO for many sites.
Buying/Selling Links:
Don’t try to buy links from other sites for getting backlinks. Sometimes, you may get banned from Search Engines for doing so. SEs only love natural links. Specially, Google made it very clear that selling and buying links are considered spam and should be avoided.
Instead of link buying, hire freelance and create a couple of guest posts and publish it on the relevant blog with the backlink to your page.
Getting Nofollow Links:
Nofollow links are in no way useful for your website to rank in search engines like Google. However, if you want to rank top in Bing, then you can continue to build no-follow links. Else if you are targeting only for Google, its mere a waste of time.
Despite, spend a little more time getting at least few dofollow (quality) incoming links. Though, Google made it clear that they ignore the nofollow tag most of the time but again if you are working on building links, work on getting dofollow links. There are dofollow forums that you can easily target.
Backlink from only high PR domains (Low PR):
Yes, it’s a good idea to get backlinks from high PR sites, but keeping a mix of high PR and low PR yields a better results. If you build up too many high PR links and no PR links, it might not look authentic.
Though there is no straight away mention from Google about this and it can be considered as SEO myth, though it’s a good idea to go for both, High PR and low PR.
Though technically I feel it’s a good idea to get backlinks from the same or sites with high PR, again link variation is very important.
Note: Links with PR of 0 and 1 are basically very low, PR of 2 and 3 is more or less acceptable, and PR of 4 and above is just fine.
Getting Backlinks from Irrelevant Niche sites:
An example of a quality backlink is a dofollow link from a high PR site within your niche (same topic). So try to get incoming links from same niche instead of irrelevant sites which adds very less weightage to your PR.
Links without your Targeted keywords in Anchor text:
The anchor text plays a major role. If your targeted keyword was used as anchor text instead of your name or your site name, then it will help you rank well for that keyword.
Note: Don’t use words such as “click here,” “check this” etc…
Though getting a backlink from a high PR site is always good but if you get a backlink along with your target or a relevant keyword, this will help in good boost of your ranking. Especially, if you are paying for link building to any SEO company, make sure you get backlinks along with anchor text, else you might not be getting value for money.
Tons of link building in short span:
Don’t try to build lot of links at a time as your site may seem a link farm in the eyes of the Search Engines. This may even make the SEs to remove your site from indexing i.e.., Ban your website from being indexed. So never try to do link building in a hurry. Remember “Rome was not built-in a day”. Slow and steady wins the race.
Avoid Site wide link:
If you are a web-development company and add site-wide footer link on your client site to your company site with something like “Web development India” “Get your website”, you are more likely to get hit by update link Penguin for too many exact anchor text match backlink. Many quality sites like wpmu.org got hit by this update, and if you have been doing this, you should stop doing it.
Also, if you are still managing your client site, a good idea is to go back, edit and make those links nofollow or remove it. Or you could add branded keyword like “Website developed by Company name”. Similarly, avoid getting sitewide links using old methods like plugin or widgets. They don’t work anymore, and do more harm than any good.
Backlink Building is a very tough yet effective way to have good rankings in top search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Whenever you working on a campaign to improve search engine visibility by link building, it’s a better idea to create a list of your target relevant sites. Also, if you rely only on article directories, I would suggest you to move your campaign style to guest blogging. Especially, after panda update: Link building via guest posting works the best.
Every one will have different ideas on Link Building. So Do Share your views on Backlink building Techniques.
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Grate post to save time and money on link building, because paid links are mostly of low quality with more quantity which is counted as spam by Google, so if every one still paying to build backinks then please stop this. You have to work a little hard to build Quality Backlinks If you can build a backlink From PR3 or Even From PR@ blog then it is far better then Getting thousands of backlinks from free hosted blogs with 0PR, Building these type of links will Mark your blog as Spam in Google Penguin EYES.
As you said getting backlinks through guest posting will be a formal way to build links,also this will helps in getting some readers to our blogs…:)
Well yes, keeping a combination of high PR and low PR seems to be a good idea and agreed incoming links from niche related sites is worth to improve PR, instead of irrelevant sites. Thanks Radha for this informative post 🙂
Well the No-Follow links also works if they are from high pr. 1 More thing, a link is a link no matter from where it is coming. No follow just saves the page authority and PR to go from 1 page to other. but still it counts.
Thanks
Reciprocal links where they are both on topic are fine. It’s an entirely natural way of the cream rising to the top in a niche.
If two otherwise respectable sites within a niche respect each other enough to link to one another then this is a sure sign of quality.
Where google is getting quite clever is in spotting unnatural link profiles (in timing, type, anchor text and quality of links).
A natural link profile has many different types of links (optimised and unoptimised). Any blatant departure from this mixed bag carries risk going forward.
I think nofollow links are also useful for a blog? I don’t think they are never considered by search engines
Really nice post actually i have seen that when i list my website in web directory then rank increase some time decrease..i want to know why it’s happening help me any one
Hi Sam, the logic is very simple. The rank of our website depends on how we update our site. The rank varies between a regularly updated blog and an irregular blog. Link Building is just an added advantage and the backlink you placed in that directory in no way influences your rankings (after it is once gone live). So, concentrate on your blog content to keep your rankings stay steady.
Is it right or good for SEO to create multiple twitter accounts, get some followers and use any auto rss publishing tool to get visitors and backlinks?
If i use bit.ly to link to my site, will it count as a backlink?
Hi Yousuf, it is good to get visitors from Twitter and RSS but remember that bit.ly is a URL shortening service and you don’t get any backlink if you use it. So try to use your original URL instead of these Short URLs if you want backlinks. All the best.
I was little bit crazy about link building and done following mistakes:
“Getting Backlinks from Irrelevant Niche sites”
Thanks for nice post.
Hi jens, you can simply install a mozilla plugin “Nodofollow” and whenever you are on a page, simply right click anywhere on the page and select nodofollow. It will automatically highlight the dofollow links in blue color and nofollow links in grey color. So, if the links in the comments are highlighted in grey color, you can easily note that it is a nofollow blog. But remember that even if it is nofollow, you’ll get traffic to your site if the comment you write is interesting. Make use of it.
See the differences b/w dofollow vs nofollow links
Thanks a lot. This was really helpful.
I would be very interested in understanding how to find out if a blog is nofollow or dofollow. For instance, when I am at ShoutMeLoud, how do I find out if it’s dofollow?
is backlinks really works to get google PR.
I found one my friend’s web site with only 2 backlinks and he got google PR how this possible?
reply me..
Hi sheikmeeran, i have already mentioned that quality is better than quality. Having a few quality links from high PR sites is worth than getting 1000’s of links from non-quality sites. I think your friend got some backlinks from good ranking websites. And quality of the content also plays a major role in getting good pr.
I can tell you more information regarding this if you share your friends site here.
Interesting article, but in my opinion, acquiring nofollow backlinks eespecially from blog comments is still useful. Is it not that we are building links for traffic? If someone visits your site because you have provided a useful comment then it has achieved it’s purpose.
And if we will try to avoid acquiring nofollow links, then who else would leave comments in nofollow blogs?
Just sharing my opinion :).
Hi Radha,
Though your article does a good job about bringing out the importance of link building, there are some things that I don’t quite agree with:
1. I think too much fuss is being made about no-follow and do-follow. While it is true that you don’t get link juice with no follow links, it doesn’t really make sense to avoid it altogether and pursue only after do follow. If you are getting a good link, get it by all means even if it is no follow. A link is a link is a link, wherever it comes from. And it helps to keep things natural-looking.
2. While it is true that high PR links can boost your SERPs considerably, again that does not mean you don’t go after low PR links. Personally I have found that if your on-page SEO is perfect, you can rank higher even with fewer links. A good mix of links from low PR sites also work well. High PR links are difficult to obtain, so the ideal strategy should be get as many low PR as you can without fussing too much about it and then get a few high PR to go along with it. It could work wonders for your SE rankings.
3. Getting links from unrelated niche sites is something I don’t agree at all. You may not get much traffic from a link on unrelated site because the visitors are not targeted but as far as a link is concerned, it really doesn’t make a difference. If you are also targeting traffic from your link, obviously it makes sense to build links on relevant sites. For example, if your site is related to child care and you get a link from a blogging site – obviously you won’t get many visitors. But you certainly get a good link.
4. As somebody mentioned here earlier, anchor text has to be varied. Using words like click here, etc are certainly a waste of time because you could have used an anchor text and got better value out of it. But I found through personal experience that wherever you are unable to use anchor text, just use your full url…. even that gives good results eespecially if you have a keyword in your url.
5. I agree with your views about backlink spamming but with a caveat. The dangers of Google de-indexing your site is very high when your site is relatively new and not attracting much traffic and yet your link building is massive. So it looks very unnatural to Google. But if your site is older and is already getting some traffic you can go and build as many links as you want from varied places. And the reason it is not so dangerous is because, Google will take its own time to index all those backlinks. They are not indexed as soon as you post them. Even if you post, let’s say, articles at different places all at once, Google will index them at different times. So in Google’s eyes…. it is progressive link building which is in fact good. Alternatively, you can stagger your link building which is an equally good strategy but I think the threat of de-indexation is more only for newer sites.
Just my 2 cents….
Reciprocal links are also getting a lot of attention, lately. It is sometimes difficult to “read between the lines” when dealing with Google, but it appears that they may now be heavily discounting reciprocal links. Does anyone have an opinion on this?
Cheers,
Roy
hi roy, reciprocal linking when done between niche related sites, is a very good strategy. But if you try to build links from unrelated sites, then it sometimes may get you penalized by the search engines. I don’t dislike reciprocal links. So best thing is to build reciprocal links between the similar niches with good page rank .
Been here for the first time.. nice info and knowledge sharing. Bookmark your site..
thanks
NoFollow are not completely useless as you have already mention yahoo & bing consider them, so you need to implement them as SEO you should target all search engine not just one & also according to Google nofollow does not pass the link juice but still use it to crawl the website, the rest of the tips every seo should follow for effective link building.
yes nikunj, no follow links should not be avoided if we need traffic as well as Rankings in search engines other than Google. But if you only need Google traffic, then its a mere waste of time. But, they help to create a good community.
Agree with you. But for the past 2 months I’ve observed that PR is getting irrelevant. Moreover Google’s toolbar PR update has not happened for July. Is it Caffeine-affect? Now it’s more of real time search…
Hi Basant, The page rank update may happen by the end of September and more over its the toolbar page rank which is just to show our website authority. The original pagerank is updated very often which is not publicly visible.
I do agree with some of the points you are making here, Radha.
I also think this is a great thing to talk about, considering that know what to do is only half of the battle; you also need to know what to avoid when link building.
However, I also have to disagree on a few mistakes.
Natural Anchor Text: It should look like the links were build by users, not for SEO sake. Don’t use the same anchor text in all your links; vary it by throwing in a useless word here and there and yes, do a few “click here” anchors as well.
Links from Varied PR Pages: Don’t make it a point to get all your links for PR 5+ pages. As you can imagine, that kind of SEO link building looks unnatural.
Also, your links Should Not Be Temporary. If you employ a link building company or use subscription software and pay a monthly fee for SEO link building services, then your links are only good for as long you are paying for them. As soon as you stop, your links will disappear.
It’s been speculated that this can even be a factor of the Google Sandbox filter.
My personal opinion: save your money. There are plenty of ways to get permanent links that are absolutely free – i.e. done by you.
What do you think about my suggestions, Radha?
Hi Ana, You’ve shared 3 beautiful tips that i have missed out. I agree with the 2 tips out of 3 that you have said.
I don’t agree with the natural anchor text (1st point) you’ve mentioned. Because, it doesn’t look any unnatural if you use your keyword instead of useless keywords like “click here”. Because keywords like those (click here, link, go here etc) will not be in any way useful for us. And one thing we should remember, not to use the same keyword more as it seems spam.
Thanks a lot for the tips you’ve shared.
I must admit that getting dofollow links are better. But I think I read somewhere that it’s not that bad to get nofollow links at all. You just have to balance the number of dofollow links to nofollow links you have.
Hi, you’re right! Also note that even though no-follow links will not help to rank in Google, they help to rank better in Bing (MSN). But, nofollow links can bring good traffic to your site if you comment on high authority sites and your comment is attractive (convincing).
Nofollow and relevant links are good as dofollow non relevant link. Actually don’t ever try to link your blog to a non relevant site.
Competition will always get tougher so you better get quality links 😉
My top tip for building backlinks successfully is variety. Articles, blogging, directories, social bookmarking, etc. should all form part of the strategy. I also keep it unpredictable and random. The more “natural” the backlinks build look, the less it matters if the backlinks are coming from high PR or lesser PR sites.