Do’s and Don’ts of Link Building

Remember back in the day when you were in school and there were said unsaid dos and donts, and if you broke them, you were pulled into the principal’s office.

Well now, you have just grown up and are looking for dos and donts for Link Building so you can increase the authority of your website and at the same time don’t get pulled down by Google.

I am going to start with do’s and then later explain you the don’ts of link building so you can stay in the good books of Google

Do’s of Link Building

Quality Content.

In school, everybody wants to be friends with Mr. Popular. But how do you become Popular? You need to be good at something right?, Studies, Sports, Extracurriculars.

Find out what you are good at and

Create quality content for the reader to use as a reference or guide.

Create content that readers will love to share.

The content can be 

1. Statistical posts
2. Listicles
3. Guides
4. Tutorials
5. Interviews with SMEs
6. Case Studies
7. Infographics

Guest Posting.

Guest posting is another healthy way to build backlinks.

Identify the blogs, and websites in your niche and email them about the possible blog article that you like to contribute to their blog/website.

It will help to increase your DA score, as the websites in your niche are linking to you.

Get rid of toxic links.

These are like those jealous kids who try to find each and every opportunity to make you look bad in front of your crush.

Sometimes your competitors or spammers will give you backlinks from spam websites to harm your rankings in the eyes of the Google search engine.

Google has provided a solution to this problem, you can disavow backlinks to get rid of the toxic links.

Get rid of broken links.

It’s like a school project where one kid works really very hard and never gets the credit.

Most of the time websites use information, and pictures from your website, and forget to give you the due backlinks. 

Simply email them and ask for backlinks. Most of the time they will be happy to give you.

DoFollow and NoFollow.

Check whether the websites giving you backlinks are Dofollow or NoFollow.

Dofollow links are backlinks that tell the search engine that the link provided to a resource should be given importance. They increase the PageRank of the website.

Whereas Nofollow links are irrelevant links that tell google the links provided to the resources aren’t important and should not be given any value.

Don’ts of Linkbuilding

Private Blog Networks

Private Blog Networks are expired high-domain websites specifically bought to create backlinks. Very generic content is posted on these websites.

If all of the PBN websites that you’ve received backlinks from are websites with very little activity, few updates, and almost no internal linking, then Google gets suspicious.

That makes it easy for most search engines to spot them.

Spammy Links.

Spammy links are like a drug dealer selling candies in the back alley.

You never know when he will sell you the wrong stuff and make you a junkie.

Spammy links usually come from link directories and low-quality websites.

You will notice a sudden spike in traffic, which alerts Google too, leading to more scrutiny.

Paid Backlinks

Paying for backlinks is a violation of Google guidelines.

The way Google tries to identify them is to look at the history of the websites providing backlinks.

It sees whether there was any history of paid backlinks or not from that website.

If yes and it is provided to the new website then it will blacklist the new website.

Irrelevant Backlinks

When we are in the process of building the backlinks, we just want backlinks. And we do not care about who is providing us the backlinks.

Let us say you are in the Plant Nursery Business and the backlinks you are getting are from the Bakery website.

Now the issue is how does a bakery improve your Domain Authority?, How can a baker judge a gardener’s skills?, since his expertise is in baking and not in Gardening.

Google sees these links as irrelevant.

Links in comments and forums.

If you have a comments section enabled on your website you must have encountered people spamming your comments sections with links to their content.

These links are usually nofollow links and do that pass link juice. On the other hand, your links can be seen as bad

Links leading to the homepage.

The backlink distribution should look like natural links to proper resources on your website.

Links to your website should not only be leading to your homepage.

Suppose your website is about a plant nursery business and the backlinks you are getting, are from the articles written on organic fertilizer.

Though indirectly related, it is highly unlikely sending the backlink to your homepage will help the reader.

But if it sends a backlink to the organic fertilizer product that you’re selling, or to the article that gives more or related information about the organic fertilizer, it will be considered a good backlink.