Link-building isn’t as simple as some people might lead you to believe. There’s actually a lot you need to look out for because your business’s entire reputation and online growth of dependent on the kind of backlinks you build for your website. So, it stands to reason why you need to pay close attention to this incredibly effective online marketing strategy that doesn’t just have the potential to make you better than your competition, but allows you to survive in this digital era! This article will highlight some of the most common, yet deadly mistakes that have the potential to do some real damage to your business. So, pay close attention to this one!

Before we get into what you shouldn’t be doing, let’s take a quick refresher course about the science behind link-building.

How Does Link-Building Work?

To properly understand the dos and don’ts of link-building, we should take a quick look at what all of it means and how it works. 

As we already know, link-building is basically the process of acquiring backlinks from other websites to your own website. These links are crucial for improving your website’s visibility and rankings on SERPs. In simpler terms, link-building helps search engines to determine the relevance and authority of your website by assessing the quality and quantity of the backlinks it has, also known as the backlink profile of your website.

So, what matters here? The Quality. The quality of backlinks matters more than the quantity. Search engines consider links from authoritative websites to be more valuable than links from low-quality sites. Moreover, the anchor text, which is the clickable text that appears in a hyperlink, is also important. Using relevant and descriptive anchor text can help search engines understand the context of the linked content and improve its ranking.

Link-building can be done through various methods such as guest blogging, broken link building, and resource page link building. It requires patience and creativity to develop a solid link-building strategy that can drive high-quality backlinks to your website. By building a diverse and natural backlink profile, you can establish your website’s authority and attract more organic traffic.

This was just a quick overview of SEO link-building and its various aspects. To learn about link-building in detail, check out our ultimate SEO link-building guide for 2023!

Now, let’s focus on the main focus of this article.

Link-Building Mistakes!

Link-building is a complex process and if you’re not careful, you can make mistakes. But, we’re here to tell you exactly what you need to avoid, take a look:

• Building Spammy & Low-Quality Backlinks

One of the most significant mistakes in link-building is building spammy and low-quality backlinks. It’s essential to focus on building high-quality backlinks from authoritative websites in your niche. Spammy backlinks include building links using comment spam, forum spam, and low-quality directory submissions. These backlinks can harm your website’s rankings, and Google may penalize your site for these types of links. But, the most devastating of them all is your reputation getting absolutely ruined when people think of you as a spammer.

• Using The Wrong Anchor Text

Anchor text is the portion of the text that contains a link to your website. It’s really important to use relevant and natural anchor text that describes the content of the linked page. Over-optimizing your anchor text or using irrelevant anchor text can harm your website’s rankings. Anchor text should be used sparingly and should be diversified to avoid any penalties from search engines and to naturally attract the user to click on your link. 

• Not Paying Attention To Diversify Your Backlink Profile

Another common link-building mistake is not diversifying your backlink profile. It’s essential to have a diversified backlink profile that includes links from different types of websites, such as blogs, forums, social media, and news sites. You also need to balance out the ratio of doFollow to noFollow links to your website. A diverse backlink profile shows that your website is authoritative and trustworthy, and it’s less likely to be penalised by search engines.

• Targeting Irrelevant Prospects

When building backlinks, it is crucial to only target relevant prospects. Relevancy is an important factor in determining the quality of a link. It’s better to have a few links from relevant websites than many links from irrelevant websites. Targeting irrelevant prospects can also harm your website’s reputation, and Google may penalise your site for these types of links.

• Preferring Quantity Over Quality

A common link-building mistake to avoid is focusing on quantity over quality when building backlinks for your website. Focus on only building high-quality links from authoritative websites instead of a large number of low-quality links from spammy websites. Quality over quantity is always the better approach, and it’s much more likely to improve your website’s rankings and reputation.

• Ignoring Internal linking

Interlinking, or in simpler words, internal linking, is an essential aspect of SEO that can help improve your website’s rankings and user experience. It’s crucial to link to your other pages within your website when appropriate. Internal linking helps search engines understand the content of your website and improves the user experience by providing users with relevant information and resources. Another benefit of internal linking you can avail is to market your own services where appropriate.

• Not Tracking Your Backlink Strategy’s Performance

Last but definitely not least, it’s essential to track your backlink strategy’s performance regularly or even weekly. You should monitor the backlinks you’ve built, their quality, and their impact on your website’s rankings. You can use tools like Google Analytics or Ahrefs to track your backlink performance. By tracking your backlink strategy’s performance, you can identify any issues early and make adjustments to protect your site’s rankings and reputation.

And so, this is exactly what you shouldn’t be doing when it comes to link-building. Consider these scenarios as a cautionary tale and do everything you can to avoid these at all costs. 
What if there was a solution to all your link-building problems? What if you never even have to think about these problems occurring in your website’s backlink campaign? Well, you need a professional link-building agency to help you out with that. A highly experienced link-building agency like OutreachGirls knows exactly what it’s doing and how to avoid these mistakes to protect your business. A white-hat link-building agency that gets results – what more could you ask for? Get in touch now and experience the pinnacle of business growth!