3 Detrimental Link Building Mistakes to Avoid

The entire concept of the internet was based on a web of links linking to each other and creating a web of valuable connections, hence, the “WWW” or World Wide Web.

Linking to other websites can be seen as an easy task however the approach that you have to make to receiving a link or linking to other websites has a lot of nuances.

You have to be careful while doing so because improper linking techniques can hinder your linking-building efforts and could also hurt your website.

But, you can always make some changes and improve your website to enhance your website’s online authority.  

This article will discuss the intricacies of link building, the importance of link building, 3 detrimental link building Mistakes to avoid, and much more.  

Importance of Link Building

Link Building is a digital marketing campaign to acquire hyperlinks to your pages from other websites. Getting a hyperlink or link in short can help both the web visitors and Google bot to navigate.

Search Engines like Google use these links to crawl to different pages and check whether the content is valuable enough to rank on SERPs.

When a site has many high-quality links pointing to it, it signals to search engines that the site is a trustworthy and valuable resource, which can lead to higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

There are primarily three most important reasons why you should have a vibrant link-building strategy-

• Link-building improves your Search Engine ranking
• This increases traffic to your website
• It passes valuable authority and credibility from a high-quality page to your page

3 Detrimental Link Building Mistakes to Avoid

You can make many mistakes while link-building. But, in this article, we will focus on the three most common mistakes that you should avoid. Here are the three detrimental link building mistakes to avoid–

1. Poor Use of Anchor Text

Anchor Text can be defined as clickable text which is visible when we click on the hyperlink. The purpose behind Anchor text is to provide information to the visitors regarding what page they are visiting by clicking on the link.

For example, in the sentence “Click here to learn more about digital marketing,” the words “Click here” are the anchor text.

When the anchor text is poorly used, Google penalizes it by not ranking the page on the SERPs. There are various metrics that Google measures to find whether the link is valuable or something that users are not using. This is the most common link building mistake to avoid.

One of the metrics that Google measures is Anchor Text, it has crawl data on the page it is linking to and compares the anchor text to the page data.

If the comparison is similar then the page it is linking to can experience a positive outcome but when it is not, usually Google treats it badly or at most indifferent to that.

A good thing is, that you can avoid the poor use of anchor text by carefully vetting out the website you approach for linking. There are a few criteria you can follow to vet out the best website for linking, which are as follows-

•         The website you are linking to should be similar to your niche topics
•         The link you are getting should come from the high authority web pages only
•         Avoid scam websites to get links

2. Linking Out to Low-Quality Content

One of the important link-building strategies is to strategically give out links to another website as well. Google refers to these links and determines the quality of content you are providing to the users.

If you provide poor-quality links then Google will not treat your content favourably and could hurdle with your rankings. The best way of giving out the links is to identify good websites and only give out links to these websites.

Always make a habit of keeping track of the website links that you are giving out and make sure it is not a broken link or redirected link. 

3. Failing to Track Your Links’ Performance

Tracking your link’s performance can be a great way of measuring your link-building campaigns. The identification will help you find out what works and what doesn’t.

But now the question is how to track it.

The easiest and most affordable way to track your campaign is to use “UTM” tagging in your links. UTM stands for “Urchin Tracking Module”, this uses certain codes in the links that help you identify the source the web visitor is coming from.

UTM’s data will be visible in your Google Search Console and Google Web Analytics and can be seen there to find how well does the backlinking campaign performing.

For example: Let’s say you’re running a marketing campaign on Facebook to promote a new product, and you want to track the traffic coming from this specific campaign. You might create a URL with UTM parameters like this:

Original URL:

https://www.mysite.com/product

URL with UTM Parameters:

https://www.mysite.com/product?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=spring_sale&utm_term=shoes&utm_content=ad1

Here are the parameters and what they mean in the URL-

• utm_source: Identifies where the traffic is coming from
• utm_medium: Specifies the medium or type of traffic, such as social, email, or cpc, etc.
• utm_campaign: This identifies the specific campaign name
• utm_term: Used for paid search campaigns to track keywords
• utm_content: Differentiates between ads or links that point to the same URL

Conclusion

Link building is the best way of quickly increasing your website’s authority and ranking on SERPs. It is important to approach it with care and precision because it is one of the most important ranking factors that Google uses.

To rank higher and make your website a good prospect for good ranking, you should always avoid bad practices. One of the most common bad practices and link building mistakes to avoid are poor use of anchor text, linking out to low-quality content, and failing to keep track of your links.

Link building is not about building bulk links and expecting a change but it is always about getting quality links and relevant links to your website.

If you improve your link-building strategies, it will enhance your site’s performance and help you in ranking your website for competitive keywords on Google SERPs.