Link building can help your rankings or it can tank them, depending on how you do it.
If your site has a strong backlink profile, it’s “telling” the search engines it’s trustworthy and that it’s worth ranking higher.
But this is what a lot of people get wrong.
They chase after hundreds of backlinks and don’t check the quality, or they use the same keyword way too much; some even use shady tactics that may have worked a decade ago, but now, they’d earn you a penalty.
How to know if you’ve been doing some of these things?
Simple – if you’ve been doing a lot of link building and you don’t see results (or you see that your rankings have dropped), you’re (probably) doing something wrong.
As you continue reading, you’ll begin to see the most common mistakes made in link building, as well as how to avoid them.
Link building basics 101
Let’s get the basics out of the way.
Link building is the process by which one tries to encourage other webmasters to link to your site with the goal of strengthening the value of your own website and brining in more traffic.
Links created from other websites are called backlinks; they tell search engines that your site is valuable and useful whenever a really good website links to your content.
The better the backlinks you have, the better the chances of your site performing well in search engine rankings.
Do note that not all links are created equal or of equal strength/importance. There are DoFollow links and NoFollow links.
The first type helps pass authority from one site to the other and helps with rankings, while the second doesn’t really help with rankings but they do add credibility and (mainly) bring traffic.
There’s also a difference between natural and unnatural links. When a site links to you because your content is useful (usually you’ve earned it), that’s a natural link.
Beyond your content simply being useful, a site might reference your website simply because it shares a similar topic, or is tied to your website’s content via context.
These natural links are also referred to as contextual links – and they are very valuable.
Unnatural links, on the other hand, are either paid links or spammy exchanges that have absolutely nothing to do with your website and they get flagged (especially if there’s too many of them).
This doesn’t mean that natural-looking links cannot be bought, or that you cannot ‘earn’ unnatural-looking links.
For instance, a black hat SEO tactic is used to flood a website with thousands of unnatural links.
A website, if not duly detected in time, could (potentially) receive a severe manual action penalty from Google because of this kind of 'attack'.
Because of this, keeping track of your link profile is extremely important.
On the other hand, you can hire a link-building agency to help you get/purchase natural-looking links. Obviously, that link isn’t naturally earned, however, Google might not see the difference.
Basically, it’s quality over quantity. One hundred bad links won’t do you much, while one or two good links can enhance your rankings significantly.
Common mistakes in link building
Link building is one of the most important aspects of SEO but since it hides a deep complexity behind the surface, it can also easily go wrong.
And this can be devastating since so much effort (and finances) goes into this process.
That’s why you might want to leave link building to the experts; if you can, the benefits of good and ethical link building services are immense because they come with people who know all the possible mistakes and avoid them.
Using a reputable link building agency will earn you long-term benefits, which is what you want in the first place.
If you’re confident that you have the skills and the time and determination to ‘DIY’ link building, then, by all means, go for it. Either way, you must know which mistakes to guard against.
Focusing on quantity instead of on quality
More links don’t guarantee high rankings. While quantity DOES matter, it’s irrelevant if we’re looking at bad-quality links.
If you use spamming backlinking methods, they’ll be detrimental to you and lower your ranking sooner or later.
Earn links only from trusted and relevant websites in your niche and keep on doing regular backlink audits to remove toxic links.
Neglecting internal linking
When people talk about links and link profiles, they’re usually referring to backlinks (which are other websites pointing towards your website), but are often neglecting Internal linking, which is AS important.
Creating a good internal link profile is not as difficult or tenacious as building a backlink profile, but if you ignore it, your SEO will suffer terribly.
When Google crawls your website in order to understand what’s it all about, it also clicks on all the internal links.
Internal links help search engines understand how your site is structured, distribute link equity across your pages, and improve user experience.
Every important page on your site should be interlinked from other relevant pages and use descriptive anchor text so that you link to additional valuable resources through which you can lend more quality to your existing content.
Conclusion
There’s no quick fix or a magical shortcut for this (regardless of what you might hear on the internet); but if you’re experienced with link building, you already know that.
Search engines are becoming too smart and the only way to do this is to do it right.
Focus on the quality of your backlinks, build a natural, diverse link profile, don’t try overoptimizing anchor texts, and if it all becomes too much, just do yourself a huge favor and hire a pro.
Today, for website creators, good SEO agencies are worth their weight in gold.