7 Deadly Sins of Link Building

Many website owners understand the importance of link building to the success of their websites in the search engines. What many of them are probably unaware of is that if it is done badly, then link building can actually harm their rankings rather than bettering them. You see, Google doesn’t like to be scammed, and it will penalize your site if it detects suspicious behavior.

The whole process of gaining back links should appear natural to the search engines, and anyone who forgets this and starts spamming their links all over the internet will soon be penalized severely. In the worse case scenario your site may even be de-indexed completely and you could lose months or even years of hard work overnight.

So what are the 7 deadly sins of link building, and how can you avoid them?

• Deadly Sin #1. Spamming Your Links. This is a definite no –no. Link building should be done slowly and easily, especially for new sites with no PR. More established sites can be more aggressive with their link building strategies but using automated tools to generate 2 million back links in a day will raise red flags.
• Deadly Sin #2. Not Using The Correct Anchor Text. Many people underestimate the significance of anchor text but it is actually very important. Make sure your anchor text contains the keywords you are trying to target otherwise the effectiveness of the link is greatly reduced.
• Deadly Sin #3. Building links from un-related sites. Google is always on the look-out for people trying to game its ranking system and it takes a very harsh line on spammers. On the flip side, it rewards people who contribute new, fresh and relevant content. If you link from a site that is related to your own with good content and appropriate anchor text your links will be rewarded with a much better score than links just dropped at random.
• Deadly Sin #4. Using Link Exchanges. These are also called reciprocal links and involve two sites linking to each other. Basically, I scratch your back and you scratch mine. These used to be a good idea but have lost their effectiveness in recent years. There’s no harm in using them as part of your linking strategy, but don’t rely entirely on links gained in this way.
• Deadly Sin #5. Linking from de-indexed sites. You would be surprised, but this still happens. People drop links onto sites that have been removed from the search engines index. As you can imagine these sites carry no link juice at all.
• Deadly Sin #6. Buying Links. Not really a sin, but usually a waste of time. First of all, you don’t usually have any control over where your links are put. That means that any of the other deadly sins can come into play, and potentially harm your site. The money spent in buying link packages can usually be better spent buying relevant content and distributing this by yourself.
• Deadly Sin #7. Not Taking Action. The biggest sin of all. Start building links as soon as you can, and as often as is safe to do so. Almost any link is better than no link at all.

Don’t be a victim of the 7 deadly sins of link building. Be smart, work hard and always remember that link building is a long term task. It is, however, one that will be rewarded if done well.