Top 17 Common Link Building Mistakes You Should Not Do

Blogging requires lots of things parallelly with updating and publishing blog content. One such thing is link building. But most bloggers do not know how to do link building and they end up doing many common link building mistakes. Building links is an essential SEO element to rank higher. Link building generally refers to dropping your website’s link on a higher rank website to fetch some traffic and authority. If you have quality backlinks, your website will rank higher in SERPs. Every blogger tries to generate as many backlinks as they can. But sometimes they make mistakes and harm their blog’s SEO rather than improving it. This article is intended to list common link building mistakes and ways to overcome these mistakes. Also, Google had made some significant changes in its algorithms that can affect your link-building strategy.

17 Common Link Building Mistakes You Should Stop Doing

Building links sometimes cost you more in terms of time and money.  Following is a list of 17 common link building mistakes which will harm your site SEO and the way to overcome these mistakes.

• Links from Bad Reputation Sites

One of the most common link building mistakes most bloggers do is they just go for backlinks count. They do not even realize if the targeted websites are quality websites or bad reputation websites. Search engines do not like sites such as gambling sites, spam blogs, and p**n sites. These sites are usually de-indexed by Search Engines due to the violation of rules or due to the stealing of Copyrighted material. You can easily get backlinks from these sites but it is not worthy. It may even cause de-indexing your website as well. So as per the ground role, before linking to any other websites, you should consider the credibility of that website.

Also Read: What is Domain Authority

•  All Backlinks with ‘NoFollow’ Attribute

If you are unaware of ‘DoFollow’& ‘NoFollow’attributes, here is a short description for you. Backlinks with NoFollow attribute tell search engines not to take these links into consideration and you will not get SEO juice from websites from which you are generating backlinks. DoFollow backlinks are the exact opposite. It helps you to gain SEO juice from other websites. So now coming to the point, you can conclude that it is useless to add ‘NoFollow’ backlinks to your blogs.

Example of Nofollow Link:

<a href=” www.google.com/” rel=”Nofollow”>Google</a>

The rel=”Nofollow” tag is used to tell search engines not to crawl specific backlinks. Google ignores the Nofollow links and would not count them as a backlink for page rank. It is used to identify content that you don’t trust or to highlight paid links.  A lot of people say that Nofollow links won’t hurt your rankings, and I do agree that they are true. In small quantities, Nofollow links should not cause any issues. However, when they are in large quantities and they’re also very low quality, they can be an issue.

Google values both DoFollow links and NoFollow links, so it’s important for you to acquire that. The point of this is that you should place more focus on acquiring ‘dofollow’ links that may pass ranking benefits. It is hard to get quality websites that can provide ‘doFollow’ links but it is worth finding them and generating backlinks from them.

Also Read: SEMrush Backlinks Audit Tool Review

• Having Lot of Links ONLY to Home Page

Many novice bloggers generate links only to their blog’s homepage and pay no attention to the rest of the site. It looks odd if you have lots of backlinks to your homepage but have ignored other pages of your blog. Search engines may penalize the sites with an imbalance backlinks proportion among the homepage and other pages. To make your backlinks account look natural, make sure you are balancing the proportion of backlinks to your homepage and other pages. It makes sense to link to other pages (than the homepage) that might contain search engine friendly keywords and content.

•  Getting backlinks from irrelevant websites

Now, getting backlinks from irrelevant websites is one of the common link building mistakes that most bloggers do. While searching for backlinks, you should concentrate on relevant sites only. For example, on my blog I am writing about blogging so getting links from finance or dating site does not help me. In fact, it can adversely affect your website as it clearly looks unnatural. Avoid getting links from different niche websites, and always try to get links from the relevant niche.  I do agree that it is not so easy to find relevant sites to get links from but it is not so difficult also.

• Lots of Backlinks in Short Time

One of the common link building mistakes is new bloggers start craving for the backlinks as soon as they have started blogging. They try to generate too many backlinks in a short period of time. Link building is only useful to your site if done systematically and done in the correct way.  It doesn’t require building backlinks quickly but it is the quality of backlinks that matter to improve SEO. Creating too many backlinks in a short period will consider as spam links and will hurt your site SEO.

So hold your horses and try to build backlinks naturally not quickly. Remember “Rome was not built in a day”. Slow and steady wins the race.

• Buying Backlinks – Common Link Building Mistakes

Building backlinks take time. But some bloggers try to overpass the time and efforts by spending few bucks. This is one such common link building mistakes that they do and it is completely wrong. SEO companies may offer High PageRank Backlinks for a small amount of money but these links will be considered as spam and illegal by search engines. Paid links might work at first but eventually, they will come back to hurt your rankings.

So remember – Do Not Buy Backlinks – Earn Backlinks

• Not Checking the Linked Sites Regularly

So, you have got quality backlinks from quality sites, What’s next? You are happy now and satisfied too. Have you ever thought to check the linked sites regularly? Mostly, the answer will be – NO. But there are chances that sites you had linked with would suddenly turn less reputed, placing indecent and objectionable contents. So, always do a walk through to the linked sites to check if they have been removed or broken.

•  Using Useless Anchor text / Over Optimized Keyword Anchor Text

It is true that all that search engine count is – Backlinks. But you should consider anchor text also for which you are getting backlinks. Using anchor text is one of the important factors that need to consider when you are building links. Few anchor texts such as – Click Here, Visit, and Goto, are barely useless, and using them is not a good idea. On the other hand, I have seen many bloggers who generate backlinks using the same anchor text resulting in over-optimization of keywords. That causes them to drop their ranking in SERPs. Also, it looks bad to have too many links from the same anchor text whether internal or external. To avoid this, try to get backlinks from mixed keywords or anchor texts. This will look natural to both Search engines and to the readers. So choose anchor text wisely. Do not use the same anchor text everywhere.

Also Read: Why You Are Not Ranking Higher in SERPs

• Getting Backlinks Is Automatic

This is one of the most common link building mistakes. Some search engine marketer says – if you build a great piece of content, it will automatically drive links. Is it true? NO. Getting backlinks is not fully automatic. It can be if you build a great piece of content and get it in front of the right people, it may drive links. But Don’t simply assume links will come. Go out there and grab them.

Other Common Link Building Mistakes

The following are a few other common link building mistakes that can affect your SEO and ranking in SERPs.

• Don’t take part in any reciprocal link building or link exchanging campaign.
• Linking from High PR sites only and Ignoring Low PR.  A mix of backlinks from both High and Low PageRank sites is required to get link juice. Learn how to improve link juice flow.
• Getting backlinks from sites/pages with tons of links
• Not using enough semantic keyword anchor text links
• Not monitoring new backlinks. Be proactive and keep an eye out for new backlinks. (I use SEMrush to monitor my backlinks regularly)
• Getting Backlinks from Pages that Spiders Can’t Crawl
• The quantity of backlinks matters rather than the quality of backlinks. Quality matters my friend!!

Also Read: How Link Building is Evolved?

Final Thoughts

These were a few common link building mistakes which you should avoid if you want to rank higher and improve your page SEO. I am sure after reading this article, you are not going to do these link building mistakes. I would suggest sticking to creating high-quality posts while following the general guidelines by Google (or other search engines you’re targeting) to get the best of both link building and SEO. What are some mistakes you have made and you think should be listed as common link building mistakes?  

I hope you find this article helpful. Don’t Forget To Share It with your friends and subscribe to our email newsletter for more such updates. What are the other points which could be mentioned in Common Link Building Mistakes ? Do you have more information to share? Do share your feedback and comments 🙂 

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Mohit Arora

Founder at CatchUpdates

Hi, I am Mohit Arora, a passionate blogger and addicted reader. You can check my another blog TutorialsJar where I share programming tutorials.

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