SEO Issues That Can Affect Link Building Strategies
We all know that SEO has two main sides to it: black hat and white hat. What’s unfortunate is that even if you decide to take part only in the latter there’s no telling that Google won’t penalize you for some of your actions.
“Google penalizing for white hat.” This sounds like a new thing, right? You have to remember that black hat techniques are not really that different from white hat techniques. Essentially, black hat is mostly the same as white hat only done very excessively.
Like when you try to submit your site to 10,000 directories overnight, for example. In such a case, submitting to directories by itself is white hat, but doing it 10,000 in a day turns it into black hat. That’s why we’ve compiled this short list of three issues that can kill your link campaign if you’re not careful.
1. Using the Same Anchor Text at All Times
Google likes to believe that all links should be built naturally. And in this case “naturally” means that other people should decide to link to you by themselves. This is all nice, but it rarely happens for most pages and news stories. You can have much better results if you help your luck a bit, so to speak.
However, it’s quite easy to overdo it. Every SEO expert tells you that you need to use your desired keywords as anchor texts. On one side, this is true. You won’t build any significant rankings if you don’t use your keywords as anchor texts.
But on the other hand, if you’re using the same anchor text over and over again without any variety then Google will catch up quickly, and stop paying as much attention to your links.
Using just one anchor text simply doesn’t look natural. If you need help with this, SEOmoz can help you with on-page recommendations. Learn more here.
2. Links From Only One Type of Sites
Link building consumes both your time and your budget. That’s why we always try to find the most cost effective and fastest method of link building possible. We usually start with one link building technique, try to master it, and then move to the next one. The approach is good but we have to be careful not to make our linking profile too uniform.
This all goes back to the idea of looking natural. If you’re building links on just one type of sites, like for example when you try to master article marketing by submitting 10 articles every day – Google will notice this very quickly. And if you’re not building other links from different sources then your efforts no longer look natural, and in the end, your link building efficiency drops significantly.
Always build links on different types of sites, using different techniques.
3. Links Pointing to the Same Subpage
This is the final problem and – again – it’s related to the idea of natural link building. Whenever people link to your site there’s very little chance that they will all link to the same subpage. The natural way is to have a big number of links pointing to your homepage and a smaller number of links pointing to various subpages within your site.
However, if you start doing really big link building to one of your subpages (like a landing page, for example) and neglecting other subpages then Google will notice that something is going on, and that one of your pages starts to receive unnatural number of links in comparison to all the other pages.
The final result is the same … your linking profile stops looking natural and your rankings stop to improve (or even drop).
What other issues have you stumbled upon in SEO that are similar to these? Feel free to comment.
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I also solicit google +1′s for subpages. To get them for free and easy I use those facebook like exchange sites.
Naturally, people will link to your page with varied anchor text. Some will even write “click here” or “Read more.” These types of links need to appear in your link profile in order for it to appear natural.
White hat is always best.
Thanks Karol,
I am going through my first link/relationship building the last 2 months and the points you raised are exactly the things most of us know but need constant reminding.
An exception to this is links to website pages themselves, which don’t have anchor text and aren’t treated the same way. So if you’re pointing to sub pages and you’ve put your keywords in your url as you should, there’s no need for anchor text. You don’t get more natural than this.
I dont agree with number 2 and number 3. If you are in a niche market, naturally there will be mostly links from that type of niche.
If you sell chia pets you, google will not expect you to have links from a mortgage company. It will expect a lot of links from one type of site, sites that invlove content of or about furry pieces of porclean or other play things.
Regarding the third point that is false as well. If you happen to have a blockbuster post that has totally unique information and everyone notices and links to it, google will not punish you for this. Why would the people linking to it link to your homepage when the backpage is the one with the blockbuster pics or information? The wouldn’t. They will link to the post, subpage, or backpage.
Doesn’t make sense. Thank you.
Lately I actually tracked and removed links which are considered spammy due to google guidelines. And what was the reward for my effort so sort out those paid spammy footer links world wide? A significant drop in SERPs … Even lost my most valuable positions! Thank you google