7 Costly Link Building Mistakes

Link building is the core of SEO (search engine optimization) and backlinks are a very precious commodity. However, this doesn’t mean that any backlink, at any price, is good. In the rush to build backlinks, many web masters and web marketers forget the simple rule that as far as backlinks are concerned, quality rules. If you want to rank well with search engines, you don’t need just backlinks – you need quality backlinks.

There are many ways to build backlinks but in terms of ease and efficiency, they are not equal. What is more, some of the link building approaches applied by many people are just wrong because they can get you into trouble. Unfortunately, it is not uncommon to see how often people make costly link building mistakes. These mistakes can cost you good rankings (and in some cases they can get you banned from search engines) in addition to the fact that you are wasting your time and money. Here are seven very common link building mistakes:

1. Linking to sites with bad reputations. Linking to sites with bad reputations isn’t a costly link building mistake – it is a deadly one! Since linking to a site is considered a form of “voting” for it, when you link to all kinds of illegal sites, this means you support them and search engines certainly won’t love it.

Even if you don’t deliberately link to sites with bad reputations, sometimes such links somehow manage to sneak in behind your back – for instance in comments, so you need to be really careful. My advice is that if you have enabled comments and they are dofollow, always check the site of the comment poster before you approve the comment.

[Note: There may not be much concrete evidence that linking to bad sites is bad, but common wisdom still says not to.]

2. Buying and selling links. Paying for links is another deadly sin and it can get you banned from search engines. There are many paid link sites and if you are tempted to buy links there, this can have an adverse effect.

3. Getting nofollow links. It is true that it is hard to get free quality one-way dofollow backlinks, but unfortunately nofollow links aren’t good. Nofollow links can bring you traffic but for SEO (at least for the major search engines) they are totally useless and in a sense the time you have spent building nofollow links is pure waste.

4. Wasting your time with many low PageRank (PR) sites. Similar to nofollow links, links from low PageRank sites aren’t your best bet. Links from low PR sites aren’t totally useless but it is much better to get a few higher PR backlinks than a ton of low quality ones. If you manage to get a low PR link, this is fine but it is pointless to aim at thousands of low PR links. 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.

5. Getting backlinks from irrelevant sites. A quality backlink is a dofollow link from a high PR site within your niche. Sure, nobody will object against a dofollow PR8 backlink from any site no matter if the site is relevant or not, but all things being equal, backlinks are valuable only when they come from sites within the same niche. Sites from similar niches are also an option, though it certainly depends a lot on how you define what a similar niche is. For instance, if you have a dating site, it is obvious that you can’t consider links from politics sites, for example, as relevant, while links from teen sites could be considered more acceptable because more or less teens are interested in dating and many teen sites cover dating as well.

6. Getting links without your keywords as anchor text. The anchor text of the backlink is also very important. The best case is when the backlink has your keywords as anchor text. This isn’t always possible to achieve but when you are negotiating link exchanges, for example, you can say what anchor text to use, so pick a good keyword and use it as anchor text. Anchor texts, such as “click here,” “check this,” and the like lower the value of your link a lot and you should avoid them.

7. Backlink spamming. Backlink spamming is also another practice, which might not you get banned from search engines but in any case it is an inefficient use of your time and money. In your desperate attempts to get backlinks, you might be tempted to post short meaningless comments on any blog you encounter or to get links from sites that look like link farms. All this activity takes a lot of time and it leads nowhere. The links you obtain via spamming might be completely ignored by search engines and again you end up without a backlink that counts.

Additionally, no matter how reliable your sources of backlinks are, you should always do some link tracking to make sure that your links are still there. Manually tracking thousands of backlinks is hardly the best way to use your time but fortunately there are some great link trackers you can use to monitor the status of your backlinks without any effort.

Backlink building is a very tricky activity. You can’t afford to skip backlink building because otherwise you won’t have good rankings. On the other hand, when many of the link building steps you have at your disposal require so much time and effort, you might be asking yourself if there isn’t a better way to use your time. No doubt, link building isn’t the greatest earner per hour but if you are serious about SEO, you just can’t skip link building. The time you have spent on link building isn’t a complete waste for sure and if you want to increase your efficiency further, you just need to sort out the link building strategies that work from the costly link building mistakes.