5 Huge Link Building Mistakes That Can Drown You

We all know that backlinks are very important for good SEO rankings and we all spend tons of time building backlinks. If you haven’t learned by now, with link building, as with many things in life, it is more quality versus quantity. What is more, no matter how diligent you are, if you make any of the mistakes I will discuss in a second, your rankings could take a hit. Here are 5 huge link building mistakes that can literally drown you and your rankings:

  1. Link trade. Google has made it more than clear that they object to link buying and link selling. Paying for backlinks to your site might look like an easy way to get backlinks but don’t do it because in the best case these links won’t count and in the worst, they will count against you. Selling links on your site is even riskier because if you get caught, you can get deindexed from Google right away.
  2. Link exchanges with sites with bad reputation. Link exchanges have always been a way to build backlinks but they have also been a huge disappointment for many webmasters because of all dishonest link exchange partners. However, the real pain here comes from sites with bad reputations because when you link to such sites, Google interprets this link as an endorsement of the bad site, and that doesn’t work in your favor.
  3. Link spamming. I have already mentioned that it is quality not quantity that matters for link building and as far as link spamming is concerned, this is more than true. You might get a gazillion backlinks from useless sites, but this won’t make you rank higher. It is much better to have tens of backlinks from quality sites than millions of backlinks from link farms.
  4. Useless anchor text. The origin of the backlink (i.e. which site links to you) is only one side of the coin. The anchor text of the link is the other side that makes a backlink a quality or a crappy one. If the anchor text doesn’t have your target keywords, then this link is next to useless. If the link is a nofollow one, it is even worse because for Google a nofollow link is not a backlink at all.
  5. Many outbound links. When your site has many outbound links, even if they are not paid ones or part of a link exchange, this can seriously hurt your rankings. Many outbound links per page not only make your site look like a content farm, but they also carry less weight for search engines. In other words, when you have 200 outbound links per page, you aren’t doing 200 other sites/pages a favor because with such a large number of backlinks each and one of them gets lost – you are only hurting your own reputation.

There are more link building mistakes out there, but these are probably the most important to avoid so keep an eye out for them!