As you probably know already, link building is an integral part to a successful search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign, but like anything in digital marketing, there’s a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Generating the wrong kind of backlinks, or generating too many too quickly, could trigger penalties and harm your rankings. Here are three of the most common link building mistakes you need to avoid:
Overuse of anchor text
One way many marketers grind down the value of their backlinks is using identical anchor text in every backlink they manage to generate. Remember, when it comes to natural search engine optimisation, anchor text is meant to tell search engines what a landing page is about. As it’s the site admin or owner composing the anchor text, it will naturally have some variations. While it’s good to write anchor text targeting certain keywords, overuse of the same words and phrases will not contribute to a natural-looking backlink profile, and that’s what Google’s looking for!
Poor link diversity
The quality of your backlinks, and the rankings of the sources where they’re published, are major factors of link diversity. Again, this is a big part of making sure your backlink portfolio is natural-looking. If your site only has a backlink profile anchored in forums, blog posts, or any other single source, it will be at risk of a penalty. Just like investment, failing to diversify your backlink portfolio is never a good idea. By distributing your eggs into multiple baskets, you’ll effectively guard your site against updates and their subsequent penalties.
Using spam links
Link quality matters, and Google’s cracking down on it with greater and greater efficiency. If you were to set up thousands of spam backlinks, your ranking may improve at first, but Google will eventually catch on and kick you off the SERP. This is another case not only for avoiding poor-quality sources, but also diversifying your backlinks. It’s absolutely integral to draft a varied link-building calendar, made up of blog posts and press releases, comments and forum posts, and any other platforms you have at your disposal.
Link building mistakes – where to find out more
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