5 Common Link Building Mistakes
Written by: Eric Brantner on March 29, 2010 – 9:53 am
Link building is one of the most important aspects of any SEO campaign. It’s time consuming, and it can be a total pain in the butt, especially if you’re making any of these 5 link building mistakes.
- No keywords in your anchor text—There’s nothing worse than getting a high quality backlink that has completely useless anchor text like “click here” or just your actual web address. It’s crucial that you build keyword-rich back links. Why? Because the keywords in these links tell the search engines (and humans for that matter) what the target page is about. As a result, keyword-rich backlinks can improve your page’s search rank for the terms being linked.
- Getting links from low-quality websites—Whenever you get links from websites that are viewed as spammy or that have bad reputations, you become associated with them. Some people call it hanging out in a bad neighborhood. If you’re connected with a bunch of low-grade websites, the search engines will start to see you in the same light as those websites. So, watch who you hang out with.
- Focusing on quantity instead of quality—I’ve always said that I’d take 10 quality links over 100 bad ones every time. Sure, quantity does matter, but link building isn’t strictly a numbers game. If all your links are from low-grade websites, they won’t carry much weight, and much of your link building efforts will be wasted. Instead, focus on getting links from relevant, trusted websites.
- Ignoring websites with a low PR—Too many link builders get too caught up with trying to get links only from websites with a high Page Rank. This is a bad idea for many reasons. See, PR isn’t everything. Just because a site has a low PR doesn’t mean it’s a bad website. Remember, a website that has a 0 PR today could have a 5 PR a year from now.
- Not linking out—You have to give if you want to receive. You can’t expect everyone to link to you if you never link out to anybody. And whatever you do, don’t buy into the myth that you lose link juice whenever you link out. That’s BS. Linking out will attract links in return, and it helps you build your network with other bloggers.
What are some other costly link building mistakes? Leave a comment with your thoughts.
March 29th, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Thanks for sharing these link-building tips. SEO is very important to me, and I always want to learn as much as I can about it.
Lately I've been putting a lot of links in the blogrolls of my blogs to help out other site owners, even if they will likely not link back to me. I want to give my readers other good sources of information, and I want to help out other sites.
April 6th, 2010 at 5:32 am
Thank for link-building tips,
April 12th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Hi Eric
Thanks for the info, you are right on all counts, but may i suggest that you could also add:
(6) Creating links to inner pages of your website, many people ignore this completely. Linking to inner pages will also help your home page.
Cheers
April 16th, 2010 at 3:20 pm
nice post
i agree with most but #4 is yes and no for me
you can link with 1000 pr o or 1 site and it iwll get u as far as 5 pr 5 or 6 sites
plus these days many people are like building into forum profile pages and other useless sites
these mean nothing
May 6th, 2010 at 7:25 am
very nice tips.
May 14th, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Nice points – thanks! I always hear that buying links can penalize you, so that might be another one? Not sure how Google finds that out – but they seem to know quite a bit.
May 18th, 2010 at 6:09 am
This is very true,
I agree with the comments above that inner pages can be just as important as the home page unless of course you are just using a squeeze page. But variety can help traffic as well if you want to increase the entire websites visitors.
May 23rd, 2010 at 1:05 am
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May 31st, 2010 at 9:41 am
No two is false and should not be, if that's true marketers would use it to bring down their competitors.
Imagine this – spam lots of post comments on low quality site and link them to your competitor – does that this bring them down?
June 2nd, 2010 at 8:20 am
Thank you for you tips. I have made mistakes according to the tips and this is really help me a lot on improving my site SEO.
June 29th, 2010 at 5:31 pm
And don't forget to vary the anchor text
July 3rd, 2010 at 2:02 pm
can you explain more about quality backlinks and how to get them easily?
August 4th, 2010 at 8:36 am
Nice post as some people are just link builders lacking of knowledge, this helps those people to become an SEO.
September 8th, 2010 at 1:23 am
very good stuff. nice post. thanks for posting about link building. i will mind your points in my work.
November 9th, 2010 at 11:03 am
It is very important to respect these 5 items indeed to achieve better results, but the tendency these days is to do less reciprocals while focusing on getting one-way. In its fight against manipulation of SERPS, Google has now created an atmosphere of paranoia and people are afraid of linking our by fear of being hit with a penalty.
January 15th, 2011 at 12:28 pm
This is the first time I'm hearing that linking out is not harmful. I had this myth for long in my mind. Today it got cleared. Thanks