Common mistakes of many SEOs are to obsessively and aggressively build links to their website to manipulate their search results. They tend to build thousand of links over night manually or automatically by submitting to penalized website directories or de-ranked article submission websites.

 Although building links pointing to a website is extremely important, there are factors that we need to consider when building links and these are answerable by you. Ask yourself the following questions whether or not you should leave a link of your website to another website.

  • Is it worth leaving a link here?
  • Will my target audience find my website if I place a link here?
  • Does this action violate the search engine guidelines?

Image credit: www.docstoc.com

Photo credit: www.docstoc.com

If the answer is no, you might want to change your mind leaving a link of your website on those websites. Why? Because basically, you are only wasting your effort to provide the required information as that will not help your website in any ways.

Other than that, there are also sensitive issues that you need to carefully deal with when building links to a website and these are:

  • Improper use of anchor text
  • Website relevancy
  • Link Relevancy

Improper use of anchor text

Anchor text is a way to drive crawlers or Internet users to another webpage and with that being said, it is inevitable to use anchor text when linking a page to another. However, some people way back in 2000-2011 had extremely abused it, which is why search engines did something for a change and this was called, over optimization penalty or the penguin algorithm.

But even until now when anchor text over optimization is  no longer advisable, there are still SEOs doing it. Even if your link is a “nofollow” link, that could still cause your website a penalty when manual penalty strikes your website. See below an example of anchor text over optimization that is given by Google.

There are many wedding rings on the market. If you want to have a wedding, you will have to pick the best ring. You will also need to buy flowers and a wedding dress.

To learn more about anchor text diversification visit this post on SEJ.

Using  exact match keyword to all your anchor texts is really a gateway to penalty and I assure you that! But if you can naturally use partial match keyword, long string anchor text or use your brand to link your website, it would be a good idea.

Here are some useful posts on exact match:

5 Reasons Why Exact Match Anchor Text is Bad

Revolution in Link Building for 2013 Revealed

Best practices:

So to be on the safe side, be natural when linking your page to another WebPages. Do not go after keyword based anchor text and do not go after rankings but conversion rate only.

“The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off: Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.”

Source https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356

Professional advice:

Each link pointing to your website is treated as a vote count for your website. So if the profile links of your website are all keyword based, you should expect to receive a message from Google in your GWT.

Relevancy of your website to your prospect website

Link building is not only placing a link to any website you find ranking well in SERP. You cannot place a real estate website to a fashion website as those two websites are obviously not in the same niche industry. If your website is about real estate, make sure that you only link to other real estate websites and don’t go out of the box!

But sometimes, just for the sake of a link count and link juice, an SEO would attempt to link a website that has nothing to do with the other websites. This behavior has made the database of search engine particularly Google, full of spam or with irrelevant information showing up in SERP for a certain keyword.

Basic advantage of linking to relevant websites:

  • This helps your website receive relevant visitors.
  • This gives your website an opportunity to be mentioned by other websites in your industry.
  • Most importantly, this does not violate the guidelines of search engines.

Check out this post about Guide to Linking to External Websites for SEO Benefit on SMG.com.au blog

Proper choosing of URLs to link to other website

Aside from website relevancy, link relevancy in your articles, comment and forum signature is another important factor. If your website is about fashion website, you should not write an article about fashion but the linking page is real estate. Same goes to comments and forums.

Make sure that the URLs you are linking to your article or comment are adding up value or information to your readers. This will not only bring you relevant visitors but you can also gain a trust from your audience.

Why link relevancy is important?

  • They add value and supported information to the content
  • Your audience will put their trust on you for giving them sufficient information

Now with these common misuses of SEOs to manipulate their SERPs, lots of websites had suffered from penalty and they had to remove their bad links from their link profile.  If you have not experienced website penalty, do not attempt to misuse the common issues mentioned above and violate the search engine guidelines for better performance of your website.

If you want your website to rank in Google, review the components of Google’s Ranking Algorithm below:

Source: Moz.com