Search Engine Marketing

Off-Page SEO Link Building: Do’s and Don’ts

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Link building is one important part of off-page SEO, if not the most important. Ranking of your website highly depends on the external link popularity of the site.

In the rush of getting more and more links for their client’s websites a section of professional link builders sometime choose the path which they should not. Implementing some dirty tricks and Black Hat SEO techniques may earn you profit instantly but not for the long run. And if you get caught it can ruin your online business entirely.

Here is a list of what you should do and what you should not as a link builder.

DOs

Natural Link Building: Adhere to the basic principles in the process of building links to keep it natural.

Limited link accumulation: Even though you acquire links by using effective methods and link building strategies restrict your link accumulation to a maximum of 15 to 20 links per day.

Building large number of links everyday may provoke search engines to treat your site a spam as such sites use unlawful tricks to gather huge number of links in one day.

Variety in anchor text: Use your primary keywords in link anchor text with variations. Spam sites send huge bulk of links with identical anchor text. Therefore, variations in keywords are necessary to keep it natural.

Contextual link building: Put your best effort in contextual link building to maximize the link value.

Consistent URLs: Maintain linking consistency by using the same URL for a single webpage instead of using any other variations of that page URL (if any). It helps in consolidating the link value.

Relevant links: Link to sites only if they are relevant to the content of your website. Like spam sites, linking to irrelevant content only for the sake of achieving a huge link target in short time will only jeopardize your site’s ranking.

Mix up link building strategies: Use an assorted link building strategy including one-way links , two-way and three-way link building to keep it natural from search engine’s perspective.

DON’Ts

Link buying: Buying link is a controversial method and Google does not like the idea of paid links.

Excessive link swapping: Link exchange or reciprocal linking might be one of the commonest ways of accumulating links, but do not overuse this strategy as it looks more strategic than natural.

Spamming: Avoid spamming tricks such as:

  • Using hidden inbound links
  • Link farming
  • Placing random links without relevant keywords close to your link ads
  • Irrelevant keywords in anchor text

Image credits: Nixwebo

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37 comments

Web Design Los Angeles July 6, 2010 - 1:25 am
I would like to add one thing get Quality Backlinks. Secondly, get it from strong source.
evan schulte July 6, 2010 - 10:56 am
These are great tips. I have seen where black hat maneuvers have really hurt a site.
Laptop Briefcases July 6, 2010 - 3:27 pm
The part about link buying is up in the air. The search engines still give benefits to purchased links. Paid links from established directories can be especially beneficial. They just don't want you buying links just for the SEO benefits.
Colleen July 6, 2010 - 5:09 pm
About 3 years ago we got penalized for excessive link swapping. At the time, we didn't think we were doing anything wrong. We were reciprocal linking with other real estate agents in other states for referrals. Well, Google didn't like that and penalized many of us. We do not do that anymore, needless to say!
Lee Ka Hoong@Starcraft 2 July 6, 2010 - 7:41 pm
Link exchange is no longer useful in improving search engine ranking. Building natural link such as guest posting and blog commenting would be the best and effective way. Well said Sankar. Regards, Lee
SEOP.com July 6, 2010 - 9:43 pm
Great tips. I also always say not to overdo your link building strategy because you don't want to be tagged as spam.
Uzi July 7, 2010 - 1:31 am
I think the best tip to me was: 'Variety in anchor text'
Jonathan martial arts July 7, 2010 - 3:22 am
Google's new strategy is to trace/analyze links, and in that context, building more links a day, as you said, may cause a website's ranking to be reduced, because the more links you create the more you might be considered as spamming.
Leo@NetAccountant July 7, 2010 - 3:33 am
Actually buying links for traffic is not frowned upon by Google, buying links for ranking is, but if you are clever about it, they can be none the wiser.
Blueberry Fruit Juice July 7, 2010 - 11:10 am
I'm a Seo analyst and doing it from past 3 years. Off page seo is essential for good search engine engine ranking. It should be on regular basis always. It also help for site/blog to get target traffic. Really on page and off page process is essential. With off page seo task one can increase their back links easily.
Plumber Sydney July 7, 2010 - 4:21 pm
Yea, while paid links are not wanted by Google there is often little way of them knowing that you have paid for the links. They are still great for SEO and will do your site wonders if the right links are chosen from authority sites and using the correct anchor text.
Laptop Briefcases July 7, 2010 - 4:29 pm
Yes it is simply too difficult to track all paid links and actually prove they are paid links. So I don't think link buying is as risky as many think. Still, make sure to mix in lots of natural links to dilute any paid links.
Fatcow Discount July 7, 2010 - 9:00 pm
The whole Google and linking and seo formula is a mystery of sorts. For example, I read about people creating link-wheels. But to do it really proper you may need 3 different hosting accounts. That's fine but you need cash flow to carry more overhead. It's amazing how Google came out of obscurity and now, pretty much, runs the web. To prosperity, Tony.
SQL Training July 8, 2010 - 2:27 am
You have provided some great tips Sankar, I think building relevant and quality backlinks is quite essential for sites to get a good ranking in Search Engines
used tires July 8, 2010 - 3:29 am
I think at this point, most of us know that Link Building is huge to the success or failure of a website, especially if the website is seeking to gain search engine traffic. If you can find the golden key to getting backlinks, you will be looking towards a healthy bank account in my opinion! Till then, Jean
ipad case July 8, 2010 - 1:20 pm
hm... this is interesting , and there is a lot of good tips from comments as well. thanks for sharing !
Mathew Day July 8, 2010 - 6:26 pm
Link building is an essential part of SEO and I've learned the quality of the link is more important than the quantity.
Sun Storage July 9, 2010 - 1:28 am
You can do everything that you think is the natural, we need to avoid all the spam techniques...i think optimizing a particular page rather than keywords is the best way to get good ranking.
viral marketing July 9, 2010 - 9:38 am
After experimenting with anchor text I noticed that verity is not that important. I used to make sure that all the anchor text was different but after testing same anchor everywhere I actually got better results. I guess it depends on your consistency. Too many links with the same anchor will probably get you into trouble.
Dany Event Planning July 11, 2010 - 9:52 pm
We are looking to get more traffic to our webstie and we added a share button fromaddthis.com and there are many options. Which (Digg, Stumble, Newsvive, etc.) bookmark option will help link building and traffic?
SEO: TopCommenter.com July 11, 2010 - 11:16 pm
Don't forget that leaving comments on blogs with Top Comments widgets is a great way to interact AND get links. We have a database of such blogs too.
jtGraphic: James Thompson July 11, 2010 - 11:17 pm
Do you could link wheeling as buying links?
Nihar July 13, 2010 - 1:06 am
Thanks for the tips...
Web Tasarim | John Alden July 14, 2010 - 10:24 am
Nice post ZK. I've seen a lot of folks who were punished by Google for exchanging links with link farms. Google is actually very (and i mean VERY) good when it comes to determine the purpose of a link. You're not fooling Google :) Just do your natural linkbuilding and you'll see results :)
smart meters July 26, 2010 - 2:20 am
I think link building is the very good way while you are doing seo for the purpose of improving your site in SERPs, and these are some really very useful tips that you have shared here and one should consider all these as they all are useful just need to remember which are dos and which dont.
smart metering July 26, 2010 - 2:22 am
These are some really very useful tips that you have shared here and one should consider all these as they all are useful just need to remember which are dos and which dont.
LeadGenix July 27, 2010 - 2:50 pm
"Implementing some dirty tricks and Black Hat SEO techniques may earn you profit instantly but not for the long run. And if you get caught it can ruin your online business entirely." - I love this line. I completely agree.
free stuff August 3, 2010 - 2:05 am
Hi Sankar, You have pointed some important secrets behind link building. Here are some additional principles that I allow while link building *DO NOT try to get backlinks from warez or releated websites and also DO NOT link to them. Links from such websites are called bad neighbors and can adversely affect your SEO. *DO NOT link to spam websites *DO NOT filled your website pages with excessive keywords. It's called keyword stuffing that you should avoid. *DO NOT use abusive language in your website. * Try to avoid getting backlinks from footer of websites *DO NOT engage in reciprocal link building * DO NOT frequently ping search engines for the update of the same page These includes both on page and off page SEO.
link building services August 5, 2010 - 9:35 am
I'm just new to SEO link building. Everything I read is very interesting and I think it can help me a lot to succeed in this business.
Internet marketing company September 3, 2010 - 3:53 am
Well link building is very useful and important for off-page SEO.The off-page activity includes directory submission, article submission,forum posting,blogging,RSS submission etc will be effective for site ranking if you do it through proper channels.
professional SEO services September 8, 2010 - 2:47 am
well i just come up with an strange experience that people use hidden links on their site they just use same color as the back ground. i don't know they think Google Crawlers are fool as man are. well Google Bots crawl the code where your hidden link is not hidden.
Neuro SEO March 28, 2011 - 6:53 am
Yeah! there are many link building spammers who try to fool search engine crawlers and their clients just to attain high rankings in short time. You can report those things to Google from this link - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35265
WILEY, M&A ADVISOR September 9, 2010 - 7:10 pm
Awesome stuff. Ok, I am a beginner in search engine optimization, and linkbuilding is still a mystery to me. So, here is a question. Let's say, have 20 money sites and 30 external pages across the web - dedicated web 2.0 properties, youtube videos, twitter accounts etc. So, I build links to those external pages to pass link juice to my money sites. Now, question. Is it better to have more external pages with less links pointing to them (assuming that each external page links to a money site) or less pages with more links?
Tom @ gutter cleaning Cleveland February 9, 2011 - 9:34 am
Great ideas for link building. That is what I'm working on right now. Is it better to link to my homepage or should I spread them out through my entire site?
3d printer March 17, 2011 - 1:49 pm
Very nice tips to share ..One of my favourite and useful link building tools is the SEOMOZ Competitive link researching tool. We use this for all SEO clients as it allows us to see where, say, 2 competitors have managed to get a link from but our client hasn’t.
White Label SEO July 13, 2011 - 2:54 am
Great tips! In a nutshell, make your link building efforts look natural. Search engines get alerted when they see sudden spikes in the volume of backlinks for a website and compel them to treat them as spam.
lose weight August 26, 2011 - 10:11 am
If we take the off page SEO for granted, all SEO can be summed up into getting as many quality links as needed. As such, all SEO tips and techniques come down to link building.
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