Link Building Mistakes You Should Avoid in 2022

Link building involves getting other websites to hyperlink to your site. While links help users navigate pages on the internet, they help search engines crawl between pages on your website. They also drive referral traffic and boost your site’s authority. Link building increases your SEO rankings, but it also helps your business build long-term relationships with other related companies. Strong links improve your site’s traffic while helping you rank.

Excellent link building indicates that you’re a field authority promoting your brand. Your sales may increase if your website is linked to relevant websites that are often visited. Link building mistakes can negatively affect your website, cause web traffic loss, and sometimes penalize sites, especially in severe cases. You should avoid or fix any issues as soon as you identify them. This article discusses 11 link building mistakes you should avoid in 2022.

Getting Links from Irrelevant Websites

Link relevance refers to how similar and valuable a site is when they link to your site. For instance, if you have a cash home buying website such as Element Homebuyers, links from websites that sell building materials will be irrelevant. Consider links from sites that sell homes for cash, as they’ll be more relevant. Relevance is a vital link-building aspect, especially for SEO value and boosting your outreach campaign’s success rate.

Link relevance is crucial because it gives Google a better understanding of your business. It also prevents black hat link building from sites irrelevant to your site. Moreover, Google can break down link relevancy from domain to page, domain to domain, link to page, and page to page, allowing for a more advanced link metrics set you can use to determine a link’s value. To improve link relevance, consider outreaching relevant websites, writing helpful content, and optimizing your anchor text.

Link Building Mistakes – Publishing Low-quality Content

Consider publishing high-value content with your readers in mind, then optimize it for search engines. Google will see how users engage and interact with your content, the shares, likes, comments, backlinks, and the time readers spend on your website and rank you accordingly. If your content is below par and no one is reading or linking to it, Google can tell it’s poor quality. Low-quality content will make it difficult for you to get backlinks and negatively impact your search engine ranking.

Poor Link Building Outreach

Poor link-building outreach derails your link-building efforts and ensures you’re intentionally avoided or ignored. Your link-building outreach may not work if you don’t take time to personalize your emails, you aren’t offering value to your audience, and you don’t do follow-ups. Ensure your subject lines are direct, specific, intentional, and personable, craft excellent outreach emails, and use proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling. In the email body, go straight to the point, explain the value you’re offering, avoid vague sales language, and do follow-ups.

Ignoring Search Intent

User or search intent refers to the intention behind a user’s or search query on search engines, and Google intends to give users what they’re looking for. When you give your audience what they want, you’ll become an authority in your niche, and Google will rank you higher on SERPs. Using user intent helps natural link building, reduces bounce rates, and increases conversion and user retention rates. User intent can be informational, navigational, commercial investigation, and transactional. Consider optimizing your content for the right user or search intent to avoid a drop in the search engine ranking.

Link Building Mistakes – Poor Internal Linking

Internal links usually help search engines crawl, discover, and index your website pages. Poor internal linking renders your website pages dormant, with no one reading them and without organic traffic. It also results in a bad user experience by making it hard for readers to find the pages they need, increasing bounce rates. With an effective internal link-building strategy, you can improve the number of page rankings on Google, generate more traffic, and increase your website’s authority.

Consider internal link building best practices like publishing high-quality content to create internal links, linking high authority pages to new ones, using the anchor text you want to rank for, linking deep, and ensuring contextual links. Use relevant links for your internal linking, avoid using too many internal links, and avoid using the exact anchor text for different pages. Proper internal linking will improve user experience and increase rankings, indexing, and conversions.

Not Removing Toxic Links

It’s essential to check your website for toxic backlinks. Toxic backlinks usually display low-quality signs or rank manipulation attempts. Low-quality links can hurt your organic traffic and rankings. Link building techniques that result in toxic backlinks include paid links, similar anchor text links, private blog networks, links from spun articles and content, links from spam comments from forums and blogs, low-quality directory submissions, scaled guest posting, widget links, and reciprocal link building. Using a backlink audit tool, you can quickly audit your site to find harmful links and remove them.

Getting Footer Section or Site-wide Links

Site-wide and footer section links are no longer effective for link building. Consider avoiding links from the footer, sidebar, and site-wide links. Build links naturally and source links from articles and other web content without manipulating Google for faster SEO benefits.

Focusing on One Type of Backlink

While a healthy link profile indicates a website’s quality to search engines, focusing on one type of backlink can hurt your SEO and web traffic. An excellent backlink profile should consist of various backlinks that can drive more traffic to your site while increasing revenue. Concentrating on either nofollow or dofollow backlinks is a link-building mistake you should avoid, as your website could get penalized by Google. You can try building dofollow backlinks via guest posting and commenting on relevant blogs to build nofollow backlinks, improving your site’s SEO health.

Not Setting Expectations

While you may want scalable link-building campaigns that generate high-quality organic links, linking to transactional or promotional pages at the bottom and middle of the funnel limits your link-building campaign. Consider setting expectations around why and how building links to these pages can help achieve your business’s goals. Knowing what to expect as an outcome will help you create a winning link-building strategy.

When setting expectations, consider why you want to link your content with targeted pages and understand how to meet your goals by using these pages and links. Consider creating internal links and direct them to the pages you want to be ranked. Create several linkable assets in your sites to generate organic, high-quality links.

Building Links Exclusively for Your Homepage

Links, especially for the homepage, were a good trend, mainly for new bloggers. Building all your links for only one page would seem artificial to search engines. This is why you shouldn’t forget other pages when building links, resulting in better linking and helping you get your posts to rank higher on SERPs. When building links, create links to other internal pages to boost your home and internal pages’ authority.

Excessive Reciprocal Linking

Avoid participating in excessive reciprocal linking. While link exchange is a quick and easy way to generate links while improving blogger collaboration, Google doesn’t appreciate this strategy. However, if you still want to do it, do it with the bloggers with high-quality, relevant blogs similar to yours.

Link Building Mistakes – Endnote

Link building improves your site’s credibility, helps your site rank, increases web traffic, and helps you stand out as an authority on your site. Consider avoiding these link building mistakes in 2022.