Why does Google hate link building mistakes? Common Link Building Mistakes to Avoid in SEO Author Why does Google hate link building mistakes? The
aim of Google is to serve the best content and search results to the
users and enable a seamless user experience. That is the reason it keeps
on updating its algorithms and recommending things like mobile SEO.
If
it doesn’t offer the best UX, it will lose its popularity. So, your
focus with the website must be to serve the users rather than search
engines. If users like your content, Google will love it.
If
you don’t keep yourself updated with the latest Webmaster Guidelines,
you will keep on making common link building mistakes. If you are not
following the rules of Google SEO, you will lose the game.
The
primary reason Google hates certain backlink strategies is that SEO
guys are manipulating things for their own benefits. You can’t over
smart Google. If you do so, the next Google algorithm update will punish
your website rankings.
Common Link Building Mistakes to Avoid in SEO Let’s discuss the top backlink mistakes in off-page SEO
that are done by a majority of SEO people today. Whether you are using
white hat or black hat link building techniques, there will be some
impact on your rankings- for better or worse.
1. Focusing only on high DA backlinks While
this is not the case with all webmasters because building backlinks
from high domain authority (DA) websites is a difficult task to do.
But if you are creating backlinks for SEO only from high DA blogs and websites, then you need to revamp your link-building strategies.
Think
of your website as an organic source where you have to plant seeds in
the form of backlinks. Of course, you will plant lots of seeds for more
trees and eventually more benefits. But you have to remember that not
all the seeds will have a long life.
The
same goes for the backlinks. Not all the links will last for a
lifetime. Some of them will become highly authoritative, and some might
shrink. So, what this means for you is that you should not solely rely
on creating high DA backlinks. The low DA backlinks you ignore today might grow tomorrow and bring you great benefits.
What
you should do is to find your competitor’s backlinks, and analyze
what’s working for them and what is their SEO link building strategy.
This will also give you an idea about the SEO trends in your industry.
Based on this analysis, build your own unique white-label backlink
building plan and execute it.
3. Press Release Link Building Creating
backlinks from press releases is a widely used link building technique.
The reason behind it is that you can easily get numerous backlinks to
your website by writing one piece of content that gets published across
multiple PR sites. In some cases, there are hundreds of backlinks
created with this link building technique.
However,
getting backlinks from press releases has become an outdated method
now. It is because SEO pros started using it as a tactic to generate
backlinks and abuse Google’s intent of serving the best content to
users.
As a result, Google now considers press release link building as a link scheme .
Generally, webmasters optimize the anchor text in the PR content with
their desired keywords. This used to help in boosting the ranking for
those keywords, but it’s no longer considered a part of organic SEO.
Your ranking may suffer because of such backlinks.
How to avoid this?
Instead
of using the links on keywords, you should go for branded URLs or naked
URLs. A branded URL is a link that is related to your brand name. So,
you should hyperlink your business name instead of keywords. Naked URLs
are those that are not used on any text. They are used as it is.
4. Blog Comments Are blog comments good for your SEO?
Yes. And a big no.
Google
used to count the links in the comments section of blogs as backlinks.
However, this is currently the most-abused technique in SEO services.
People are generating blog comments using automated bots. These are
called spam comments.
In
fact, if you have a WordPress website, you might have noticed hundreds
of comments done on your blog posts for the sole purpose of backlinks.
Akismet, a popular WordPress plugin that helps in preventing spammy
comments, reported that it filters more than 7.5 million spam comments every hour.
5. Buying backlinks Should you buy backlinks for SEO?
Every
SEO person will say no to it. However, this is a tactic that many of
them use but never admit. There are many agencies today that offer
backlinks service in bulk at a cost-effective price.
For
example, this agency is selling 10,000+ backlinks for just $75. Could
you believe it? You just have to pay and they will generate thousands of
mixed backlinks from high DA, .gov, and .edu websites.
he
search engine giant is very clear about things. If you buy backlinks in
exchange for money, links, or services, it will harm your rankings on
the search engine results page (SERP). This is by far the biggest link building mistakes to avoid in 2024.
If
you want organic rankings for your website with organic link building
techniques, then you must rely on SEO services offered by a reliable
digital marketing company.
6. Creating too many backlinks in short period Undoubtedly,
earning or creating quality backlinks boosts your search engine
rankings. But one thing you need to take care of is to avoid building
too many backlinks to your website within a short period of time. There
is a term in SEO called link velocity, which represents the rate of link
building for your site.
If
your link velocity is high, you are at risk of getting penalized by
Google in terms of search engine rankings. While Google says that
backlink creation should be natural, SEO guys know that they have to put
in effort to build backlinks.
However,
don’t make things too obvious for Google. For example, your website has
only 20 backlinks for the last 2 years, and this number becomes 250
within the next month. Wouldn’t that sound too fishy?
This
is yet another big SEO mistake that you must avoid while building white
hat backlinks. You can also hire SEO analyst or expert for your website
who can create a proper backlink and SEO strategy. This will help you
avoid link building mistakes and rank on the first page of Google
organically.
7. Overloading the anchor text Anchor text is the text or words that are hyperlinked to another webpage.
For example, the ‘digital marketing course’ in the below example is an anchor text.
“Digital marketing course helps you build several skills related to SEO, social media, online advertising, and more.”
While
creating backlinks, the strategy of most of the SEO executives is to
get a backlink on the primary keyword of the website or a web page. This
improves the website ranking for that keyword.
While this strategy works, but if you overload the anchor text or keyword with the same link, Google will count it spamming.
Since
the release of the Penguin update in 2016, Google also checks whether a
website is over-optimized using backlinks and anchor texts. Google
doesn’t penalize your entire website though, but the ranking of the page
you are getting the backlink to will be affected.
The
role of an anchor text is to tell users and search engines about the
intent of the hyperlink and what to expect from the destination page.
However, if you are creating numerous backlinks to your website with the
same keywords, this will alarm the search engines that you are trying
to manipulate things for higher rankings.
Hence,
you have to ensure that you avoid this SEO mistake. While backlink
building, try to use the link on a mix of long-tail keywords, phrase
match keywords, etc.
8. Backlinks from websites with bad reputation Google
doesn’t like certain websites, like spam sites, casino and gambling
sites, porn sites, illegal and duplicate content blogs, etc.
If
you are getting backlinks from any of such websites, then you need to
get rid of them. Google will lower your rankings. Your aim should be to
earn backlinks from reputed and authoritative websites.
On the other hand, if you run a blog where you provide backlinks to bad websites, it will also impact your rankings for worse.
9. Backlinks from irrelevant content At WsCube Tech, a digital marketing and web development company ,
if we build backlinks from websites dedicated to travel, games,
finance, and casino, Google wouldn’t miss noticing this. Why will a
travel or game website link to a digital marketing agency?
A
couple of backlinks created naturally might not get Google’s attention.
However, if you are just increasing the number of backlinks without
seeing whether it is coming from relevant niches or not, then your
chances of getting penalized will just increase.
10. Low-quality guest posts This
is one of the biggest and top link building mistakes to avoid if you
want to leverage white hat SEO. If you are someone who thinks that it is
a matter of generating backlinks, regardless of the quality of content,
then it is a myth.
There
are many webmasters and SEO people who write an article for a guest
post, and then create multiple duplicate copies of the same. Their aim
is to submit the content on various websites or blogs and build
backlinks. \
Another
such practise is paying peanuts to cheap content writers for new posts.
Of course, you will get some new content with corners cut from
duplicate content. But this is nothing more than a fly removed from
stale food.
Google
is very smart. It has the potential to determine quality content that
can offer value to readers. If a piece of content is not valuable to
users, Google doesn’t like it. Creating backlinks with low-quality
articles and duplicate content should be avoided.
If a guest post ranks higher, your backlink will also be more valuable. You can’t achieve that with poor content.
11. Generating backlinks automatically There
are numerous free and paid backlink generators or automated link
building tools available on the internet that ask you to enter your
website URL and it will generate multiple backlinks for you in a matter
of minutes.
This is really too good to be true!
What
these tools do is throw your website URL at hundreds of others sites
using bots. With this link building technique, you are just inviting
spam to your website and increasing your spam score. This declines your
organic rankings and harms your SEO efforts.
Wrapping up:
Also, always focus on quality over quantity. Google is really smart and will catch these mistakes.
Which
of these top link building mistakes are you making currently and
looking to avoid now? Let us know using the comments below.
