If you have been in the link building business over the past years, you must have noticed that things don’t work the same way any longer.
Generating tons of search engine traffic by slapping a few reciprocal links on your page simply does not work.
Before you embark on your SEO link building quest, it’s useful to understand what strategies DID matter a while ago, but are merely obsolete today - learn from the history, you know.
Link Building Mistake #1.
PRECISE ANCHOR TEXTS - previously, SEOs used to optimize their sites by using the same anchor text for all their links.
Well, this strategy is not that hot these days; as a matter of fact, you can be penalized by Google for doing that and not even know it.
Natural anchor texts are the key today.
But what is natural you might ask?
Basically, a natural link looks like it was built by a user, not an SEO. Normal users would not use a precise anchor text in their links, neither should you.
In practical terms, when working on your link building, don’t just use your high value keywords in your links, but throw in a few “natural speech” words in their as well, like “cool site”, “click here”, etc. Don’t over-optimize!
Link Building Mistake #2.
GOOGLE PAGERANK - is not a good indicator of the page strength any longer. The famous green bar has been a JOKE ever since Matt Cutts of Google confirmed that Google “takes care of people querying the PR data too much or too heavily.” (resource link: http://www.marketingfan.com/matt-cutts-confirms-we-return-ed-random-pagerank-data)
Sounds like Google returns random page rank data if they feel like it - just because it’s fun to fool SEOs.
Link Building Mistake #3.
ALEXA RANK - this metric is geared towards online marketers and does not truly measure ALL the traffic that might come to your site.
It’s based on the sample of Alexa tool bar users, it’s browser specific and can be easily manipulated. Plus, the formula itself Alexa uses to determine its page rank is overwhelmingly debated.
Link Building Mistake #4.
GOOGLE BACKLINKS DATA - don’t ever trust Google to really tell you how many links a specific website has. Plus, when you do a Google search on your links, random samples are returned, so you might see the spammiest of all links you have.
This was also confirmed by Google in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjQ2QVQpaK0
Link Building Mistake #5.
GOOGLE CACHE DATE - this metric has also been used and abused by SEOs to the point that it cannot be relied upon. Juicy pages that rank are often returned as having no cache set.
So forget about the cache date as well.
Now that you know what NOT TO DO, spread the word! Let your friend, colleague, downline know!
And, yes, leave me a comment while you are at it - I truly need your feedback to keep me going.
Charley Chris
Hi, this is off the scope of my comment but, you’re beautiful! Now to my main comment…
You talked about link building mistakes but you didn’t suggest the correct link building methods we should be using. I know that logically, one should avoid the mistakes ‘cos that’s the way to build links correctly. But…
How then do we evaluate the seo value of a page we’d like to get a link from. Is it through Seomoz’s page authority?
I wanted to push this through your contact page but thought I should post it here instead.
The compliment is much appreciated…
There are many ways to determine the SEO strength of any particular page, and yes, I do use SEOMoz ranking quite a bit for that.
However, especially with all the recent Google changes, I stopped paying as much attention to acquiring SEO-specific links and started focusing on achieving natural linking more than anything else.
Charley Chris
Hi, thanks for replying. I believe attracting natural links is the best SEO strategy now and it’s always been, but you need manual links to get your site off the ground.
True.
I just don’t sweat getting the “perfect links” as much as I used to.