Link Building Blunders to Avoid

Nobody said link building was easy, because if it was, everyone would be doing it.

This is the reason why only a select few digital marketing agencies stick to link building.

Also, an effective link building strategy takes at least 3 months to produce results.

Some business owners don’t seem to have the patience. So, if you’re someone

1. 1.      Who’s stuck with a business owner who hands over the task on Monday and expects results by Friday

1. 2.      Who doesn’t know what not to do regarding backlinks

1. 3.      Simply looking to get things perfect the first time (don’t worry, you won’t)

     This article is for you. I have listed a few blunders (or mistakes, if you like that word more) that you can avoid to meet client expectations.

 

Letting Broken Links Exist

Broken links are a pain. You see, the Google crawler lacks direction. It needs interconnected pages to properly “judge” your page.

The moment it spots a link that leads nowhere, it gets defensive. And in turn, it informs Papa Google that the website’s quality is poor and is of no use to the audience.

You’d want to avoid this.

Any marketer would periodically check the links on a website. The purpose is to find links that point to pages that were removed for some reason or don’t exist anymore.

 

Quality over Quantity

Sure, lots of backlinks to your web pages are good. But have you ever taken their quality into consideration?

This should be on your mind when you think about link building. Having a ton of backlinks to a webpage is useless if it doesn’t have relevant content or, even worse, poor/spammy content.

Use one of the free backlink tools on the internet and run an analysis. Once you find links you don’t want, contact the site owner and send a request for link removal.

 

Too Much Looping

This is the perfect example of the saying, “Too much of anything is good for nothing.”

Internal linking is actually a valid strategy when it comes to link building. However, do it too much, and Google gets angry.

To be precise, don’t force visitors to click one link after another without an end in sight.

Another related blunder marketers make is a redirect loop. It is when a group of pages link to each other, creating a never-ending loop. (RIP crawler)

 

Not Following the 3-Click Rule

The three-click rule is an unofficial rule followed by strategists. It states that a visitor will get frustrated and leave a website if they cannot find what they’re looking for in three clicks.

The rule might sound harsh, but it is fair when you realize that the main purpose of a website is user engagement and lead generation.

This is why it is essential to redirect the visitor to what they’re looking for in 3 clicks.

Although Google doesn’t penalize this blunder, it is vital when it comes to a better user experience, a factor that’s important as a business owner.

 

Bad Links

You can also call them “toxic links.”

These are links from low-authority or spammy websites. Unless you have a dedicated team, monitoring links is a demanding task.

The funny part is that, usually, it’s bots that are responsible for these kinds of spammy links.

How do you avoid this? Well, simply use one of the countless backlink analysis tools to identify links that point to your site. Once you find them, all you have to do is disavow the link.

 

Weird Website Navigation

Every website (or at least the good ones) follows a link structure. In addition to assisting the Google crawler, a well-structured website enables ease of navigation.

This is where proper sitemap planning is important. A well-devised sitemap offers a website plan aimed at visitor navigation and link building.

A better website navigation structure, or a properly planned sitemap, would benefit not just the users but the Google crawler as well.

Here’s a pro tip: Include a search bar at the top of each webpage so that visitors can just input a search term instead of clicking everything aimlessly.

 

Orphaned Pages

Orphaned pages are those pages on your website that have no internal links to them. In other words, they’re just there without any purpose and are hard to find unless you specifically launch a hunt for them.

Orphaned pages are problematic for a website.

They lead to wastage of crawl budget, indexing issues, and can affect SEO performance.

So, how do you avoid this? Just don’t forget to include links to all your pages. Also, make sure that all your pages serve some purpose for the visitor.

 

Buying Links

The title is pretty self-explanatory. It is the process of buying links in exchange for either money or other services.

Why shouldn’t you buy backlinks for your website? Because Google doesn’t like it.

Although buying links gets you super-fast results, the consequences make them not worth it. Buying or even selling links is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Your website can end up being heavily penalized by Google.

 

Relevance

It’s nice to have a lot of links pointing to your website. But are they relevant to your niche?

Suppose you own a website selling farm equipment, but the majority of links that come to your website are from sites dealing with fashion accessories. This is a strict no-no.

You’d ideally want links from websites that belong to the same niche. Why? Because it makes it easier for Google to categorize your website and measure the quality of links and your website.

Also, having relevant backlinks increases the authority of your website.

 

So, there you go. These are a few of the most common blunders marketers make when planning a link building strategy.

This is by no means an exhaustive list. The article has some of the most common mistakes marketers commit, either because of the minimal effort it takes, budget constraints, or to avoid missing deadlines.

Keeping these blunders in mind will help you build the perfect backlink profile without any shortcuts.