It’s an unfortunate reality that SEO isn’t an exact science. It’s also a skill in an industry that is constantly evolving. We’re all taught different strategies during our careers; however these are often dependant on either budget, or the previous experience of your superiors.
As an affiliate marketer my initial understanding of link building was non-existent, but over the years I focused on uncovering “the secrets of link building” which progressed very quickly from directory submissions to outreach, link bait and other strategies that are still working to this day.
In this post I’d like to dispel some of the most common link building errors that I still see on a regular basis. In a post-penguin world we all need to be a bit more careful and acknowledge that link building en-masse simply isn’t a sustainable strategy.
1 – Not Linking Out
It’s a common misconception that linking to external sites is bad for your SEO. This usually manifests itself in three forms: A loss of organic visibility, loss of pagerank or losing the user to an external site.
However most sites brand and authority sites link to external resources. Below is a snippet from one of the BBC’s latest news articles. It contains 4 external links, none of which are “nofollow’d”. Wikipedia includes citations and external links whenever appropriate as well.
As long as you’re not linking out to malware infested, pop-up loving sites that revolve around adult entertainment and illegal content, odds are you’ll be increasing your visibility within the SERPS rather than decreasing it.
2 – Focusing on One Link Building Strategy
A few years back directory submissions were the flavour of the month, article submissions had their 5 minutes of fame and blog commenting pre-nofollow days resulted in outstanding results.
Diversity is key when actively building links. Natural profiles usually consist of a mixture of all types of links, earned and built as well as anchor text diversity (covered below).
What’s the current strategy of choice?
A lot of SEO strategies are now increasingly reliant on guest posting. While there is no fundamental issue with high quality guest posts submitted to on-topic sites with genuine reader bases, the issue occurs when agencies and service sellers start trying to mass-produce guest posts, cutting costs and quality suffers.
Diversify your link building strategies, aim to get editorially earned links, share your content freely and encourage sharing both socially and via outreach.
3 – Lack of Anchor Text Diversity
In high competition niches, anchor text abuse is a common sighting. Insurance websites are particularly guilty of heinous crime.
Looking at the top 10 results for Car Insurance in the UK you can see just how heavily they weigh on exact match anchor text.
Larger brands will get away with this to a certain degree, but those that are too obvious will be penalised. Try to build brand led links and semantically related anchor text, and don’t forget your “junk” terms like “click here” etc.
4 – Focusing Heavily on “DoFollow” Links
Matt Cutts has stated on numerous occasions that the nofollow attribute results in a link not passing along PageRank, it also results in the anchor text being ignored, except on the odd occasion due to a bug.
However, one could argue that having a link profile that consisted entirely of “dofollow” links would also look abnormal.
Once again I’ve taken a look at the top 10 results for “car insurance” in the UK and you can see the percentage of NoFollow links varies wildly from 1.41% up to 30.86%.
Other case studies have shown that building NoFollow links has resulted in an overall increase to visibility. This could however be due to another algorithmic factor that takes the number of do/nofollow links into consideration. When building links, where possible, try to get a dofollow link, but don’t neglect the benefits of a nofollow link from certain sites.
5 – Using Public Link Networks
It seems a given, but every few months Google comes around and wipes another popular link network of the face of the planet. The Russian SAPE network is rumoured to be one of the next networks to be taken down, but as of yet it still seems to be working.
@dannysullivan @seocom just another day at the office for me.
Okay, gotta look at some really naughty Russian link selling software now.
— Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) February 13, 2013
It should go without saying, but using network links on your client sites is not only immoral, but it reduces the credibility for other SEO’s that put the hard work in. If you can’t rank the site legitimately, then don’t risk your client’s livelihood over a couple of bucks.
Featured images:
- License: Image author owned
- License: Image author owned
- License: Image author owned
- License: Image author owned
- License: Image author owned
Sebastian Cowie is a freelance SEO expert and founder of SebastianCowie.com. He spends most of his time focusing on link building strategies and working on his affiliate projects. He occasionally comes of out of SEO hermit hole and if you’re lucky, you may catch one of his contributions on SEO sites around the globe.
