Trying to make your blog rank higher in search engines can be a tough road to travel, especially if you’re in a competitive niche. But it can be easy to get off from the road because to trying out techniques that may actually hurt you in the long run rather than helping you.
Sometimes, even the best link building intentions can be flagged as spam to the search engines algorithm so make sure you’re not doing any of such link building blunders.
Here are some link building mistakes that may penalize your blog:
Overloading Exact Match Anchor Texts.
It’s tempting to load every link you get out there with the exact anchor text you’re trying to rank for, but this looks unnatural and will bring forth Matt Cutt’s spam-hammer faster than JC Penny’s link portfolio.
The FIX: Vary up your anchor texts between brand names, direct URLs, and similar anchor texts to produce a healthy links list.
Scraps Are Delicious!
Just ask any dog, table scraps are the best thing since Bacon Bits. If you also want to rank for a highly competitive keyword then you may be doing wrong as many times your hard work will go in vain and you will never be able to rank for that competitive keyword.
The FIX: Let the big boys duke it out over the ultra-competitive keywords like dog food while you pick up long tail keyword links and rank high for terms like best dog food for big dogs. These long tail keywords are far easier to rank for and have a higher conversion rate to broader keywords. And also that, never do keyword stuffing.
Staying Away From Peddlers.
Sure, spending $5 for 500 links sounds like a great investment, but just see how well that work for the above mentioned JC Penny’s. After the NY Times ousted them for having unnatural and paid links, Matt Cutts personally penalized the site rather than waiting for Google’s algorithm to do it. Even if you don’t attract attention from the polo wearing spam fighter, buying links is in direct violation to Google’s protocol and once they get sniffed out, your site will suffer.
The FIX: Link to yor site from relevant and quality pages. If you do pay for link building to get trafic, make sure that they’re marked as nofollow advertisements to keep Google’s crawlers happy.
You Scratch My Back…
And leave it at that. Just like paid links, exchanging links with another site is a no-no for search engines. It’s basically just another form of currency, but for some reason people treat it like a link building technique but it can hurt you as much as help you.
The FIX: Link exchanges are alright if the links bought add value to both the sites, but you shouldn’t make a practice of it or do it in a large scale.
Don’t be Introverted.
While it is still unclear what social media links do for SERP rankings, it surely can’t hurt. Give your readers plenty of options to share, tweet, like, +1, digg, and link your pages to their heart’s content. If you have great content it will naturally build links over time just from people linking to it – give them the tools to do so. That being said, don’t just sit around and wait, promote any new changes as they happen on your social media platforms and engage with your readers.
These are some of the most common mistakes people make when they’re starting to link build, but they are by no means the only mistakes.
A common rule of thumb for quality link building is that the more natural and relevant a link is, the better it is in the search engines eyes. Person to person communication is a great signifier that the link you’re shooting might be good, but if it looks like spam and smells like spam, well it’s probably not Bacon Bits…
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Thanks McMahon for this blog post i was focusing more on back linking weather it is good or not .. now i understood whole concept
Great. Quality is more important than quantity. 10 good quality backlinks >> 1K low quality links.
I totally agreed. You can buy 1000′s of low quality link from Fiverr at $5 but its going to do more harm than good. Spend more time on quality link and google will take care of you…hopefully.
Dhaval, Thanks for the comment. And yes, if you like Crown Royal you’ll be a great link builder – Quality over Quantity!
So, exchanging links also prohibited? or is there any limitation?
Dn’t go out of authority sites. Stay in them and link from them. That’s it..
Avi Jit ( invites you to read…Link Building Mistakes That Will Penalize Your Blog While Working on SEO
Thanks AVI. As resourceful as always
As Google states here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 “excessive link exchanges are prohibited. It is natural for two sites in the same niche to link to one another if they both find each other useful, but if Google can tell that you’re promoting link exchanges you will be penalized since that is an attempt to manipulate the SERPs. As for what Avi said, you can link outside of authority sites but just make sure the sites are relevant and of good quality and that you’re not linking to them just so they link to you.
Yes quality is important than quantity….Was important to know..Thanks for this..
Thanks Neek – nice to see you again.
I agree with you. I prefer quality rather than quantity for everything on my blog whether it is Traffic, Backlinks, Twitter Followers, Email Subscribers.
Quality weighs more than quantity in a long run.
Thanks Thejas, now we just have to convince all of the black hat SEOs and bloggers to follow suit and the internet will be a better place for it.
On the quality links, how can you control who links to you? I didn’t think you could. I’m amazed that I still get emails from people that want to pay me for a link. I just put their emails in spam file now as they must not be aware of Google guidelines.
Lisa, you’re correct – you can’t directly control who links to you. Sometimes black hat SEOs will build spammy backlinks pointing towards their competitors sites in the hopes that they’ll get penalized, but this is becoming less common. Every website will have some poor links and it’s only in excess that it becomes an issue. If you’re concerned about your link portfolio, contact the webmasters where the links are located and request to have your link removed. If this doesn’t work, try using Google’s Disavow tool which helps to tell Google not to include certain links while they rank your site : https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2648487 just make sure you read through the document carefully and that you understand how to use it. It should be a “last resort” tool after you’ve tried to get the link removed by other means.
Thanks Thomas, good to know I’m not nuts on the incoming links
I’ve heard of that tool before from Google but haven’t used it. Understood it is a last resort for sure. Thanks for the follow-up on my comment, appreciate the answers and feedback.
Google knows about negative SEO and also that competitors may hurt each other. Google is smart in deciding which link to consider. But if it does a mistake then you can always use the tool that Thomas mentioned. But, be sure to use it only when it’s very necessary to use…
Always glad to try and help, Lisa. And thank you for taking the time to read my piece and comment, it means a lot.
Hey McMohan.
Well written and really worth reading
Cheers.
Thanks, Zion. But it’s “McMahon”
Thank you so much for this post .
Only a real blogger knows the importance of back links . It is as impotant as a good quality post . It helps in promoting the site . Your post is really very help full for those also who starts their blog or any other site first time .
Once again Thank you so Much .
Thanks, Deepak.
Best of luck.
Yes social media links matters…for example Google considers number of Plus you got for your material and promotes in SERP.Similarly Bing takes Facebook likes to promote contents.
I can’t speak for Bing, but Google+ is mattering more and more in the SERPs. Users like Mark Traphagen who are leaders in their industry have content on Google+ that consistently ranks highly in the SERPs. Although, I think aspects like Authorship and future Author Rank will be more important on G+.
You had me with all your comments and fixes, until, “Don’t be introverted.”
I’m a business coach for introverts. Introverts DO engage, probably more than extroverts, online. When you said, “… don’t just sit around and wait, promote any new changes as they happen on your social media platforms and engage with your readers.” While we might want to think something through before we post it, or engage, we usually do so at a meaningful and well thought out level.
Just don’t confuse us that we don’t engage. It’s simply a different engagement.
You’re right Patricia and I apologize – I didn’t mean the term in the traditional sense.
What I meant by that sentence, was to not be afraid to put your work “out there” online. Yes, sometimes extra thought goes into how we want to share it or if we should share it but, in my opinion, anything you’re putting on the internet is -by nature- designed to be shared with at least one other person… or then whats the point of hosting the content on the web?
Thanks for catching my misuse in language, I’m trying to be more aware but I still slip up.
For last few months I have been concentrating on building backlinks. Thanks for sharing your wonderful post.
Thanks Lahkyajyoti, good luck to you and stay away from those black hat techniques!
Can you tell me how can i know that the backlink i am going to make is giving my article a boost…
Make sure the backlink is on a relevant site to your niche/article – that’s the most important thing in my opinion.
If you want to track traffic and things like that, Google Analytics should be helpful to you. If it’s a guest post on a site you don’t have access you and you have Google Authorship enabled, use the Webmaster tool, Author Stats to see how your articles are doing: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/labs-author-stats-1?hl=en
Nice article Avi but want to know can commenting with your name can also lead to overloading ?
You mean Thomas.
Ok. so answering to your question, First thing is that your name is not keyword, (except that you’re a celebrity
) so no big problem in commenting on a lot of sites with your name..
Second thing is that, many of the blogs are nofollow, so no issue at all.
Third and main thing is that, Google knows that people comment on blogs with their names, so no chance of overloading.
Hope that helps, and clears your doubt.
Pawan, don’t worry about commenting with your personal name, but if you’r commenting with your brand name then you may want to be more careful. However, if you’re link building using quality techniques, using your brand name as anchor text is encouraged rather than solely using keyword anchor text. Brand names cannot be overloaded when it comes to a link portfolio, if that were the case Pepsi would have trouble ranking for “pepsi”
Exactly Thomas McMahon. But is there any thing special in using Google+ link?
Does it Helps improving Author Ranking?
Pradeep,
Author Rank has not yet been implemented, but getting Authorship enabled has been associated with a strong presence on Google+ and I think it’s pretty safe to assume that Author Rank will take into account your social presence, especially on Google+.
Other benefits include almost immediate indexing by Google+ when a link is shared on the platform. Rand Fishkin recently did an experiment on this and a brand new page could be found in the SERP almost instantly and the site didn’t have to wait to be crawled. Note that the page did not rank highly or well, it was merely indexed quickly after a link to the page was shared on Google+.
Hi Thomas,
Good to see you here with useful post. After a long time I’m reading again about “Link building” and Webmasters mistakes. Let me going back to flash memory in 2009-2010 SEO was so easy, like exchanging links with others, forum profile and signature links, directory submission links, article directory links and now in 2013 SEO is like a “HeLL”!
Google wants only quality sites to rank well in search thats why SEO is changed, now we need to focus on writing quality content, social media sharing and only building white hate quality backlinks.
Bashir,
Thanks for reading and for the comment. Link building has certainly changed drastically, but unfortunately people are still hiring “black hat” SEO’s who do a lot more harm than good since they build low quality back links that get sites penalized.
Quality content is key! Can’t stress that enough
long tail keywords is what we are good at…and thank god they are not taken….some very nice points outlined here to prevent getting penalized from google…i never ever have exchanged links!
Long tail keywords are a great way to get traffic in competitive industries.
Thanks for reading and for your comment, and way to not succumb to black hat techniques!
Google these days Is Giving More value to Links and Also Punishing Sites Who build Links In Unmannered and From irrevekant Sites.Your Post Will Help Them…
Thomas, don’t you think sometimes Quality backlinks need to spend money instead of time.
Some Newbie blogger don’t have money to spend on, that’s why they go with low quality backlinks.
If possible, Please write article on “how to Grab Quality backlinks without spending Money – For newbie Bloggers”
Thanks in advance.
Hey RapidRoaR, thanks for reading and for asking a great question. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get great backlinks, unless of course you’re hiring a link building firm. In that case, the best services to cost a pretty penny.
Honestly the time involved is your biggest expense which is why many people turn to professionals even if they do cost a lot. However, if you have a good network and know other bloggers within your niche, being able to get good backlinks through guest posts is a great way to go about it.
Well there’s always the issue of getting a ton of spammy links that you didn’t ask for. But as one comment states, one healthy and high quality link is worth 1000′s of low quality ones. I learned in the past six months we were hit by a number of low quality links, but from our experience all the healthy ones make up for the spammy ones without issues. Whether negative SEO becomes a big deal or not, Google was definitely smart by inputting the Disavow Tool as the last resort weapon. Sometimes you just can’t clean up all the low quality links, specially if you didn’t ask for them.
Hi Vanja, it’s true – you can’t stop spammy links from coming to you directly but I personally think negative SEO isn’t as common as most people think. More often than not, if you’ve gotten thousands of spammy backlinks it’s usually from your own SEO efforts or a company you hired who used spammy tactics. The Disavow Tool is great, but as you also said it’s a last resort and you have to put tons of time into trying to get the links removed naturally.
Thanks Thomas for this great post. I know about “keyword stuffing”, that will give back links early but after some days you lost what you get and you lose your serp position also.Thanks for teach me many facts about link building.
Hey Steav, keyword stuffing usually wont get you backlinks directly – they’re only there so readers and crawlers know what to find on the page. But too many forced keywords on a page read terribly and shows Google’s algorithm that you’re trying to manipulate the SERP. I wouldn’t stress about keywords on the page – just keep it natural and you’ll be alright.
Thanks for your replay Thoms.