5 Common Link-Building mistakes that are hurting your SEO

Adi Kumar

Nov 14, 2018

5 min read

Do you know what’s the single most important thing Google takes into account to ascertain the position of a blog or webpage on its result pages? The number of backlinks it has managed to acquire over time. Backlinks have always been important when it comes to Google & SEO and they are not going to lose their importance any time soon. I think a lot of webmasters and bloggers today know this for a fact that the number of backlinks they have acquired for a particular webpage or blog will directly affect its search engine rankings and try to get as many backlinks to their pieces as they can to get to the top. And in order to do so, they often, unknowingly, make use of bad link building techniques or practices which hurts their backlink profiles rather than improving it.

Are you constantly building links for your blogs or webpages but are seeing little to no effect on its search engine rankings or the traffic they receive? You might be making these link-building mistakes I am about to share with you.
Obvious disclaimer - We religiously take care of the below mistakes and a lot of other things for all our link-building services that we provide to our clients. So, take note -

1. Focusing on quantity, not quality

Like I said, in their pursuit of building as many links to their content as possible, bloggers and webmasters usually take help of influential people in their industry to share their content with their respective audiences for extra exposure, traffic, and backlinks. To do it quickly, they start pushing out subpar content to build backlinks with as many influencers as possible. Some accept that subpar content for the heck of it, some reject it right away! But a backlink from a publisher who has accepted your subpar content will not do you any good in the long run.

The essence of building links through guest posting lies in providing your best content and helping other audiences, it is not just about getting a link. If you have pushed sub-par content, users will not be motivated enough to click through the link and see content you want them to see, defeating the purpose of creating a backlink in the first place. And the ones who actually do come will bounce sooner than you think because they have already established a negative mindset about your business when they first saw your sub-par content. Yes, getting a lot of backlinks is important, we understand, but never compromise with the quality of your content. That way, if you luckily strike a chord with them and they love your content, you give them an opportunity to share it amongst their social circles which I think is 10x more impactful. Strive for those natural shares.

2. Not checking the domain authority of a website

Getting a low-quality backlink for your content is even worse than not building backlinks for it at all! So, making sure that the website you’re trying to get a link from is of high-authority becomes important. But how do you figure out if a website in question is high or low on authority? By using tools out there that can provide you with such kind of functionality. ‘Domain Authority’ is a term coined by Moz to give users a basic idea of how strong a domain’s position is on SERPs and how likely it is to rank at the top of Google based on a scale of 0 to 100. It ranks websites on some of the most prominent factors (40 to be exact) Google takes into account to rank a webpage or blog on the result pages. Strive to vouch for the backlink of a website with a domain authority of at least 30 above to see a favorable effect in your search engine rankings over time.

3. Not doing it naturally

In order to gain as many backlinks to their content as possible, many webmasters end up buying links, indulge in link-exchange schemes/link-farms or straight-up use any automatic link builder found on the web which does all the legwork of building ‘natural’ backlinks for them, either free or by taking a minimal fee. But, mind you, Google today can accurately recognize if you’re making use of any unnatural link-building technique or tool and can easily penalize you for it. Also, by going for automatic submissions your run the risk of placing your backlink along with questionable or adult content, which is never a good thing for the brand rapport you’ve worked to establish with such dedication.

4. Building irrelevant links

You need to be building backlinks from websites that are laser targeted to your niche. Anything other than that will only clutter your backlink profile, not strengthen it. But webmasters and SEO’s ignore this simple fact in their pursuit of trying to acquire backlinks from wherever they can. Even if you are building high-authority backlinks for your website, it will be of little to no benefit for you if the targeted website does not resonate with your industry niche. So, get your blinders on and try to find the best influencers and publishers in your niche to get the best out of all your link-building efforts.

5. Not keeping a check on them

The task of building new backlinks for your webpages or blogs doesn’t end when you have actually built them, you have to constantly monitor them as well to make sure they are up all the time working for you. The thing is, it’s normal for publishers to entirely delete or put redirects on certain content pieces for the upliftment of their website but it’s you who’ll have to make sure that your link is still up there. For the same, you can use a tool like Ahrefs to keep a check on all your links and fix discrepancies as they arise. You’ll also have to make sure that every backlink you create for your website doesn’t have a ‘No Follow’ attribute to it. The ‘No Follow’ attribute doesn’t pass the important link juice that could have been beneficial when it comes to increasing the authority of your website. Also, make sure that there are no canonical tags placed on your URL to make sure your content does get indexed by Google crawlers.