Top 20 Link Building Mistakes to Avoid in 2023

The Link Building is an SEO strategy, which is to generate links from other domains to our website, to increase the level of authority. These links are known as backlinks and play a fundamental role in SEO positioning. In this article, we will explain in detail why they are so important and how to get quality backlinks to climb positions in Google. In SEO, particularly, links are also vital. This is where the backlink comes into the picture, which allows you to receive traffic from other pages to yours. The key to using these inbound links is in their naturalness and in that they are linked from relevant pages, which are generally the ones that more users will move. It may not seem important to you, but the more links of this type exist, the greater the chances that someone will reach your page. However, never put quantity before quality, as Google will notice and penalize you in no time.

Link building is an essential factor in search engine optimization (SEO), and it can be positively influenced by website managers. SEO measures relating to external links are called link building. However, the permitted methods and, above all, the most promising ones have evolved considerably. In this article, we offer you information on the basic aspects of such link building and on how you can use backlinks on your web pages and some of the pitfalls to avoid.

SEO disciplines in link building.

As a discipline of SEO, link building is primarily intended to improve the ranking of web pages in search engines. Search engines identify the importance of web pages through, for example, the links that refer to each of their subpages. Quality links that refer to the page will enhance its ranking. To achieve this, backlinks are placed on other web pages. These links distribute referrals to the website itself and are known as ‘recommendations’. These types of marketing measures are included within the so-called off-page optimization since the external links are placed outside the website itself. A backlink is an incoming reference and will be designated as an inbound link.

Link building as a positioning factor

Backlinks have other goals, other than page views. Building useful links should also drive search engine optimization. In this way, good long-term positioning in the results lists allows you to obtain more visitors than with external links. For those who want to place advertising formats from other pages on their web pages, a good search engine positioning can become a magnet for advertisers, which can consequently generate additional income.

In general, the prestige of a website in search engines will be evaluated based on two factors. A web page’s reputation can be significantly increased the more times it has been linked back to. The designated context of each incoming link plays a very important role, too. When a backlink is part of one of the pages that has been positively valued by a search engine (for example, on a well-known, relevant, and/or reliable web page), the popularity grows more than when the link is placed on an unknown web page or with a bad reputation. In principle, it could be said that the more you know about the context and the more relevant your content is to the topic of backlinks, the more suitable will be the conditions for increasing the reputation of a web page.

Unnatural links destroy SEO

A recent study showed that unnatural links can inhibit your success. The study covered more than 800 backlink profiles with the visible frequency of cases for which a website is penalized, as shown in the following graph with the most common results of penalties. Regardless of whether a website is trustworthy, Google can determine some links as toxic when they do not seem natural or when it is evident that they are paid. Sponsored (paid) links are the main reason Google penalizes these unnatural links. Guest articles and press releases are being penalized more frequently also. Working with link building requires care and dedication and there are few agencies or people who understand the matter. There are hundreds of professionals who claim to do that job safely. Therefore, before hiring them, ask for a demonstration of the links they built, ask how the blogs or sites were chosen to create the backlink, and how to monitor and control those results.

Additionally, check if the charge will be per month or per link created. It is common for this to impact not only prices but also quality. If the agency chooses to charge for links, the more it does, the more it will earn, but it will not always be guaranteed that they are high quality or contextual links. Those that charge monthly are more conducive to delivering, almost always, a smaller amount of links, but with more quality and context for your business. There are exceptions for both cases, but a more detailed search does not hurt. All of that will make a difference.

It is also important to note that Google may take up to 6 months to restore organic SEO results and it may take up to 3 reconsideration requests to remove such a penalty. Luckily for some, Google does not penalize for having a single unnatural or organic link, for this to happen there must be a few more. Considering the above, it is very convenient to establish a monthly review routine of your backlink profile to help you determine which links may cause you problems. Two tips to avoid falling into penalties of this type:

• Always use the set of attributes rel = ”nofollow”, rel = ”sponsored” or rel = “UGC”.
• Remove the “follow” or sponsored attributes if they have not worked.

Until you experience a negative SEO attack in the first person, you do not know what you are facing. We must not fall into the trap of having too many backlinks online and make the mistake that they are not of quality. For optimum positioning, these links must be from pages with good positioning. And that they can also be done in the most natural way possible. Google can detect certain failures and we can be penalized. Therefore, ensure that natural and healthy links are worked into your marketing strategy.

20 Common Mistakes Of Link Building

Every online project is committed to a link building strategy to occupy the first positions in the search results. When developing this SEO activity, we must be up to date with the constant updates in Google’s algorithm and what penalties it establishes in all those techniques aimed at obtaining links. As in everything, to improve one must be wrong. Before you make a mistake, you can save time with these tips to avoid the most typical mistakes in link building.

1. Link to the main page: Naturalness is the quintessential principle of Google. To be as natural as possible when referring to another website, we must specify a page on it, since when someone links naturally they do so to a specific content (articles, services, products).
2. Avoid “nofollow” links: It is a mistake in which many fall thinking that these types of links do not have as much weight as the “dofollow”. Now, the link “nofollow” is closely linked to the naturalness that Google claims. We can say that the “nofollow” link helps us not to be penalized.
3. Accumulation of links in the Blogroll: The links from Blogroll so used for years, can bring us penalty problems since it is a practice that reports a large number of links from the same site because they are common spaces on all pages of the same website.
4. Little attention to the anchor text: Variety is the most natural thing you can find. When crafting the anchor text, forget about the keyword, and be as natural as possible. Links with anchor text such as clicking here, on this page, or through an image or URL are some examples.
5. Leave comments with unlimited links: Comment on a post related to the theme of your page and that the message you leave adds value and is of interest is an option to create a link to your website. Leaving links on any site and in any way carries a clear penalty because, guess what, it’s not natural.
6. And the competition …? Knowing what are the steps that the main competition takes is essential, since where you do not arrive, sometimes others arrive. With the SemRush tool you can find out who your first competitors are and you must analyze, monitor, and improve what they do and you don’t have to always be ahead.
7. Link little by little: The speed at which we make the links is very important. We must distribute the links we want to generate over time; it is “unnatural” to create a large number of links in a short time and suddenly stop.
8. Neglecting the links and concentrating on social networks: One of the most common mistakes made by inexperienced content creators is focusing too much on social media. Remember that a different strategy is proposed for each platform and that of link building is not married to these spaces. The inbound links generated on these Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter add little authority to the web or e-commerce. To achieve good SEO it is important to find a balance between both systems. Social networks are an excellent means of attracting visits, but they should not be the basis for building links. Use them to respond to your audience, inform, promote your website, and attract valuable traffic. Meanwhile, take care of the links to strengthen the authority of your site and its positioning. So those who enter will know that they will find quality products, services, and content.
9. Use forced or unnatural anchor text: An anchor text is one of the bases to present your links without making them look forced or unnatural. It is important that you “disguise” the links with the writing. And that you put them only when necessary. These should take users to an internal or external page that answers their questions and gives them valuable information.

It is important that you do not use the same anchor text for all the links and that you play with the key phrase.

10. Put your link on low-quality websites, forums, or directories: Do you remember we talked about Google sanctions? Well, the practice of placing links to your website in low-quality sites, low reputation directories, or spamming other people’s blogs can be dangerous. It is better to avoid a search engine penalty and not search for a bot or malicious visits.
11. Not maintaining a balanced flow of links: You have to make sure that the flow of links is balanced so as not to arouse suspicions from the search engine. For that, monitor your link building well. That is if in one week you generated 20 links and the next 5 there is an imbalance. This is going to arouse suspicion on Google. To manage SEO, be careful with these small details and avoid problems. To avoid falling into this error, do a monthly review of your links, rethink, correct, eliminate or place no-follow to suspicious links. This monitoring will help you position your website faster.
12. Beware of affiliate links! If you have an affiliate system in your e-commerce, you should take care of your link building strategy with greater skill. It is best to have the advice of a professional who only deals with this to avoid penalties as much as possible. These kinds of methods attract a lot of sales and traffic. But, the problem is that people sometimes share their links on low-category sites or forums. This is counterproductive for SEO and could end up associating your business with dishonest practices. It is advisable to place a no-follow tag on affiliate links to keep the strategy in balance.
13. Caution with collaborations and guest blogging: Guest posts are highly recommended for your link building strategy, but you must be careful about who you collaborate with. Investigate the blog or business with which you are going to relate and the conditions of the proposal. Review its material and content to assess whether it is in tune with what you produce.

Before collaborating, establish conditions and that these do not affect either of you.

14. Do not monitor the links: A common mistake is forgetting to monitor links regularly. We already mentioned how important this is to avoid unbalanced links. This is common for people who run their blog or business who are too busy. This process is more important than it seems.
15. Direct all your energies to home: Even some webmasters consider that home is the queen in their link building strategy. This no longer works and can cause significant problems in SEO positioning and website authority. First, there will be a problem with the anchor text that will always lead to the home page and then with the usefulness of the information.
16. You don’t make active searches: If you have a new blog project, actively look for people with a similar project to establish good relationships, and ask for inbound links. Problems could occur if you don’t find websites from your country or with other people who are in tune with the topics of your website.
17. You forget to comment, too: Quality comments shouldn’t be forgotten. If you forget to participate in commenting on articles related to yours, you can miss out on good backlinking.
18. Create attractive content: Exceptionally bad content will not do you any favors; it is likely to hinder you further. If you are creating poorly written content, with spelling and grammar errors or articles that feel forced or seem as if it is forcing sales, it will be a difficulty.
19. You don’t analyze and change the stream: If you are not analyzing implicitly, then you will not be able to monitor what is working and what isn’t. You should have a dedicated team that looks at the analytics every month.
20. You don’t use infographics: You may be missing a trick if you don’t include this last point. Infographics work very well for backlink generation. How do these work to generate backlinks? After creating the infographic, leave an “embed” code at the end and send the infographic post to subscribers of your feed or newsletter. This will be disseminated naturally if it is of good quality and with relevant information.

Further mistakes to consider when link building.
Judge a site by the PageRank Authority

Not all websites are the same. How is a good website judged? The answer is authority or PageRank, which is a popular measure used to judge authority on websites. However, PageRank can be misleading. It is not clear exactly how a PageRank affects the ranking of sites, and it is only updated once a quarter, hopefully. The idea is that we do not completely ignore PageRank, but we are aware of its limitations and the use of other factors to measure authority on websites. Here are some questions to ask ourselves:

• Does the site feel like a trustworthy site?
• Does the site have readers who take the content seriously?
• Does the site have the authority, but is it relevant to my website and my client?

Link to a single keyword or key phrase:

The goal of a successful link building strategy is a natural link profile. If a thousand people link to your site, not all will likely use the same key phrase. It is recommended that with each link you should use the main keyword as much as possible. Keep track of the anchor text you use, make sure there is a mix of anchor text that contains:

• Brand name
• Website address
• Secondary keyword phrases

Try to target 1 Billion Links:

How many links must a site have to be competitive? Your research on the competition holds the key to determining this. If your main competitors have an average of 1,000 links, aim for what you need to be competitive. Set your target number of links 2 to 5 percent higher than your competition. This way you can maximize the efficiency of your SEO activities and scale your link building techniques. If you don’t set a target number based on competition, you could spend too much time building the link, rather than reinforcing page optimization or focusing on social media. Healthy, excellently placed links are what will work in your favor.

Just link only to your home page:

Attract links to different pages on your site. If you have a good structure of internal links that access any page, you will increase the general PageRank of the system and strengthen all the pages of your website. Also, this will help you rank for multiple keywords and drive more traffic to your website. It also forces you to think about the user; linking to an internal page will offer more value to the recipients of the content. For general marketing management, it is good to review the online and offline marketing activities of industry leaders. But only through focused and competitive research based on the most visible sites, will you have an idea of ​​what needs to be linked to your site to be competitive. External links are constantly changing, but if you focus on building a balanced link profile that helps Internet users find valuable content on your website, then you are going to get ahead in the long run.

Tips on how to use links well without making mistakes.

Since the Google Penguin update, a lot of importance has been given, above all, to the natural growth of the links, or at least to a growth that seems natural. It would be convenient for web pages to create a good reputation through quality content and also to achieve great popularity in the search engine environment, which should be the basis for most of the inbound links of the websites. The quality of the content of the web pages should always be a priority factor, something that should also be very present in the field of link building. However, new web pages experience some difficulties in building a good name in search engines quickly, even when this could be justified by the quality of their content. Since a new domain does not have a significant influence on search engines, you first have to build a certain reputation and then gradually gain their trust. In this regard, some methods are authorized to speed up this process.

• Content specifically created for backlinks: Good content is linked before bad, so the quality of web pages is the most important means of generating natural external links. Also, when it comes to linking between web pages, some content is better than others: diagrams and infographics, tips and reports, Top 10 and similar lists, articles by, and interviews with experts, as well as humorous and original comments are among the most used techniques.

• Proper link environment: Oftentimes, it is not within the power of web managers to decide which web pages are linked on their pages. Despite everything, it is advisable to reserve the right to demand the removal of links in unsuitable environments that have a bad reputation when their presence is recognized. Otherwise, the backlink may create more inconvenience than a benefit. When the languages ​​and countries of the pages that link and those that are linked are different, this can also be equally detrimental to the linked page. In the case of wanting to mention a page when exchanging links, for example, it is necessary to foresee whether the possible associated web page provides a suitable environment for inbound links. Web pages that have a high ranking in search engines transmit a higher level of link juice to the website itself.

• Natural link exchange: There are many scenarios in which the reciprocal exchange of links between two web pages is recommended in all respects, such as when an article from a thematically relevant area is published on a web page of a similar subject matter. In weblogs, on the other hand, so-called blogrolls are presented to carry out the exchange of links, that is, lists of links that refer to relevant web pages with similar content or associated web pages.

• Use of deep links: Anyone who wants to exert some influence on the internal links that redirect to their web page (for example, in the case of the natural exchange of links) should consider the use of deep links or deep links. Deep links refer to a subpage of a web page, although they differ from surface links, which establish the link to the main page. Deep links are usually useful for certain thematic pages or landing pages to increase the popularity of their links and their domains due to the privileged place that link juice occupies.

Exceptional SEO and good links are certainly attainable, but educating yourself will ensure that you succeed quicker.