Link Building Mistakes and How to Fix Them
Link Building is a fundamental SEO practice that has been around for a long time. Despite a lot of people saying that it is no longer as effective as before, we believe that it is still a strong strategy that is able to help generate traffic and expand online presence.
There are many ways to create an effective link building strategy, with each website requiring you to change your tactics to accommodate specific needs. However, mistakes still tend to happen, and this can negatively impact your website, causing a loss in traffic, and at times leading to some websites getting penalized in the most severe cases. It is best to avoid or fix these issues as soon as possible, and we’re here to help you do just that.
Link Buying or Selling
Link buying used to be a notorious practice during the 2000s, with some websites outright promoting this service. The objective of their service is to improve your Google rankings by charging for links. This was during a time in which Google PageRank was a metric that everyone wanted to focus on, which resulted in an overflow of paid links across the internet.
Eventually, Google started to lock-down on this practice, leading to these services being penalized. Link buying has also become one of the reasons why PageRank was shut down, as websites focus on the metric rather than crafting quality content that can generate organic traffic. While this practice may no longer be as blatant as before, there is still a considerable number of websites and people still trying to sell links to websites.
Link Buying is a black-hat strategy that should be avoided at all costs, as it can undo all of the traffic that you have taken a long time to grow. The best fix for this practice is to ignore any pitches that imply the buying or selling of links.
Poor or Generic Email Pitches
Having a good email pitch is a fundamental link building skill, as it is the deciding factor on whether or not webmasters would be interested enough to click and read your pitch. From experience, I’ve seen countless emails that contained email pitches that felt generic and templated, with barely anything to get you interested to respond to their inquiry. Email pitches are the first step in building links and having a well-written email that can leave the reader invested into collaborating with you helps open up more opportunities to build meaningful connections.
Personalizing your email outreach is also another great way of promoting your pitch, while also establishing good rapport from the get-go. Other types of great pitches are the ones that address a need for a service that you are making an inquiry to or providing a service that they would need. Answering a question usually offers the best ways to create a good email pitch that would definitely help you establish that much-needed connection.
Link Spamming
Another notoriously common practice, link spamming usually happens on blog comments, guest posts, and online forums, where users would type in their comments, containing links to poor-quality websites, or send in guest posts containing spammy links. It is a common sight to see these posts and comments on a lot of websites and email pitches, and there are times that it can feel like these spammy content contains recurring patterns that you would be able to recognize quickly, making easier to avoid and fix.
Spammy anchor text is another issue, as this is where users would commonly place their spammy or harmful link in a post or comment, under the guise of promoting content. The best solution to link spamming is making sure that these posts do not get published in the first place, as you can see these bad links by the time you review the post. Tools like Disqus also help protect your website from link spam, as you can review, edit and remove links that might be harmful to your site, making sure that you’re not a victim of black-hat SEO.
Not establishing relationships with webmasters
Link building is not only a strategy that helps you promote and connect content to other websites, but it is also another way of establishing a network and form beneficial partnerships with other websites and services. This means that link building is more than just making sure you link your content to other websites. Another great practice is supporting each other’s websites by subscribing to their content and responding to their social media posts.
Establishing a relationship Forming partnerships with other webmasters is essential, as you would be able to pitch more content to them, while also getting promoted by them as well. This healthy relationship allows you to establish a network where you can continue building links, allowing your website to generate more traffic and gain more link juice. Good rapport brings in more benefits for both parties, fostering connections that can open up even more digital marketing opportunities.
Private Blog Networks
PBNs have been centers of controversy in the SEO industry, as people dispute whether they’re black-hat or grey-hat practices. Either way, building links through PBNs are best avoided at all costs, as they can cause your website to get penalized by Google, causing way more problems than solutions.
PBNs are for people looking for an easy way out, but this also increases the risk of getting punished and losing all of your traffic quickly as well. Ranking well and building links is a process that requires you to invest your time and effort into growing your traffic organically, which means that any process that tells you otherwise means they’re not playing by the rules. Like other black-hat SEO strategies, a PBN is another example of making shortcuts in gaining traffic, at the risk of Google giving you severe penalties.
Key Takeaway
Like every other SEO strategy, link building requires a lot of time and effort to grow and generate successful results. Mistakes will only hinder you from this goal, which is why knowing about them allows you to avoid your website and links from being compromised. Link building is a fundamental SEO strategy, and these entries would only help you know the best ways to optimize your strategy for more success.
