TOP 8 link building mistakes that are hurting your website!

Everyone who deals with search engine optimization will sooner or later be confronted with “ Backlinks ” confronted. Link building mistakes are a big problem, especially for laymen – this is no longer as easy as it used to be.

Backlinks are “recommendations” from other sites. It’s like the apples from the farmer around the corner (yes, we’re from the country): The more recommendations the farmer receives from “influential” people, the more promotion the farmer’s apples receive. The same principle applies to backlinks – when big, great sites link to your site, Google thinks “The page must also have relevance” and ranks it (at best) higher than before in the SERPs. So today I’m going to show you the top 8 mistakes that happen in link building so you can avoid them – let’s go!

Top 8

Only links from the same page type: A normal website has links from different page types (blogs, forums, article directories…). The “natural link building” would therefore not be given!Try to make your link building as varied as possible to signal to Google that your link building is natural.

Risk: low

Top 7

Backlinks from suspicious and weak sites: You should also be careful with websites that offer quick and easy link exchange. First you should check the content of this website more closely – sometimes such a page turns out to be a so-called“link slinger“.You should be critical if the title or body of the website contains words like:

– “Link Forum”
– “Link Directory”
– “Article Directory”
– “Submit URL“
– “Submit Link” and so on.

The following metrics offer you a good orientation:

–DR(Domain Rating)
–DA(Domain Authority)
–TF(Trust Flow)
–CF(Citation Flow)

Risk: medium

Top 6

Over-optimized anchor text: Google also notices when backlink profiles have too many optimized link anchor texts. It’s logical, because..:

“Would any author really link your pages with the same money keywords? Of course not!”Make sure your links have a variety of “natural anchor texts“(brand name, simple URLs like naked links, sentence links, etc.).

Risk: medium

Top 5

Links that come from the same IPs: To the extent that many links come from websites with identical IP addresses, this is an indication to Google that they are link networks.Google doesn’t like that! So always check the IP addresses of your links!

Risk: medium

Top 4

Sitewide Backlinks: Links in the header, footer or sidebar areas are also not “great” for Google and can be used in the in the worst case, lead to punishment. These also have no added value for the user who comes to the page from the search results.Try to keep the number of “page wide backlinks” as low as possible.

Risk: high

Top 3

Links from websites that are not found on Google: If you have a link from a site that is not listed in Google’s SERPs, it may have been excluded from the index due to a violation of Google’s policies. With the help of the Google Site Query you can easily check it.Links from such websites can’t be good for your rankings!

Risk: high

Top 2

Backlinks from sites with massive outbound links: A backlink from a site with hundreds or even thousands of outbound links is usually not highly ranked (unless Google hasn’t figured that out yet). However, this is usually only a matter of time before Google assigns an active link sale to that page. While this is old bread for SEO bunnies, it should still be considered.A lot of outbound links are a sign of low quality (spam blog). These backlinks are suspicious and should be checked and in the worst case removed.

Risk: medium

Top 1

Too many identical anchor texts: Until now, the following was true: Anchor texts with a frequency of approx. 30 – 40 % are unproblematic. But now things are different – anchor texts have become much more important to Google, i.e. avoid “money keywords” that you have already used frequently. Check this for exact matches via a tool such as. Ahrefs.Make sure your anchor text density doesn’t exceed 10% and try to avoid “hard money keyword links”.

Risk: high

Our conclusion

Since Google used to put less emphasis on monitoring link building, you could gain a significant ranking advantage through targeted “spamming” – that’s over now! Google checks the link profiles more than ever.

Notice: Bad backlinks are not only “useless”, but even harmful for your website.

Practice: How to get rid of harmful links?

1. Ask the webmaster to remove the links.
2. Disavow the malicious links via Google’s Disavow Tool. The chances of webmasters ignoring your emails are very high – using the Google tool, you tell the search engine to ignore or invalidate those links – you can also find instructions in our post or via Google directly.

But be careful: Be careful when choosing the links you invalidate on Google – if you invalidate the wrong links, you can’t undo it and Google support won’t take care of your “careless mistake” either. 😉

So: You don ‘t have to devalue your links every day – it’s important to know that it’s quite natural that a bad link appears sometimes. It is important that these links do not take over.

Notice: For normal websites with about 5,000 visitors or less, it is sufficient to “clean up” the link profile once a year.

If you haven ‘t done any link building yet , our article Building Backlinks will surely help you. For new sites that don’t have any links yet, the following article will help you: Link building for new sites.

We hope you have fun optimizing!