10 Link Building Mistakes to Avoid In 2024

Getting your company noticed online takes a lot of effort. It’s not just a case of building a website, then sitting back and hoping for the best – such a passive strategy will most likely get you nowhere. One of the most enduring and important strategies for gaining exposure for your company and website is link building.

When it’s done right, link building gets you high up in Google’s rankings and search results, giving you a valuable flow of visitor traffic you can then monetise and allowing you to race ahead of your competitors.

Link building remains the fundamental pillar of search engine optimisation. Google – the dominant player in search and de facto gate-keeper to the net, where most people around the world begin their online journey – views links from one site to another as the most effective way to determine the value or worthiness of a website to show in its search results.

So if The New York Times’ website happens to link to yours – perhaps you have a blog post there that has information relevant to a story – you can be sure Google will reward you site with higher rankings, due to the backlink from one of the world’s foremost websites.

But if you get backlinks from a bunch of spammy sites or blogs with poor content, you can not only expect no Google goodness – but the opposite: you may be penalised by its powerful algorithms for possibly engaging in shady SEO practices. Then your site will suffer as your rankings plummet or are wiped out altogether.

So you have to be careful when carrying out a link building campaign, and don’t fall into traps that could end up costing you big. Here we’re going to give you the top 10 link building mistakes to avoid in 2024 so you don’t suffer dramatic falls in your website rankings.

Mistake 1: Incorrect Website Prospecting

Not doing your homework at the outset could land you in a world of link building trouble. And it’s certainly not a case of trying to get backlinks from any old site on the net. You need to do solid research and find websites that are relevant to your industry, as well as more general sites and blogs that may be related to your niche — if, for instance, they have a news, lifestyle or other section that covers the sector your business is in.

Prioritise websites that have solid content and are easy to navigate and avoid ones that:

• Are spammy
• Have poor or thin content (including directories)
• Are full of ads
• Are badly designed and difficult to navigate
• Have guest posts relating to adult topics, gambling, illegal activity, prescription drugs, and others that could land you with harsh Google penalties

Websites of these kinds may well be link farms — sites that exist for the sole purpose of making money by selling links. Successive Google algorithm updates, including Penguin, penalise such sites, and a link from one will do you more harm than good. So steer well clear of link building mistakes like this.

When you’re researching sites, it’s not only just about how they look and how well their content reads. You also need to look under the bonnet, to see how they’re performing. Using tools like Semrush or Ahrefs or MajesticSEO, check:

• Domain Authority/Rating – Moz does the former, Ahrefs the latter; it’s a ranking score marked out of 100 and is based on a site’s backlink profile – how likely Google is to return you high up in its results is determined by the kind of links pointing to your website. Generally you should avoid sites with scores anywhere below 20.
• Trust flow – determines how trustworthy a site is to place links on, taking backlinks, where they come from and the volume of traffic that comes through them into account (aim for scores over 50).
• Citation score – this tells you how influential a website is, and again it’s totted up based on backinks and the quality of the sites they’re on. A good score is anything over 50.
• Spam score – you should be looking for extremely low percentage scores: 1, 2, 3%. Anything close to 100%, forget about it, as the sites are low quality, full of spam and links placed on them will harm your website – one of the biggest link building mistakes you can make.
• Organic traffic – the amount of visitors who come to a site directly or via a search engine like Google, not from paid ads, showing how active and popular a website is, compared to one with low or no traffic that’s just there for money-making reasons.

Mistake 2: Building Irrelevant Links

This link building mistake follows from the previous one. If you selected sites that are irrelevant to your sector and go ahead with getting links from them, Google’s powerful algorithms will detect them and your site may suffer. With the advent of artificial intelligence, which Google has been building into its systems, it’s a sure bet that evading detection of questionable links will become almost impossible.

From Google’s perspective, the whole point of links is not only to let it determine which sites are worthy of high rankings, and those that are not, but to provide value to people using the internet. This, after all, is what all the algorithm updates are about: to weed out shady SEO (like keyword stuffing) and other practices and make the internet a better place for everyone, not a kind of digital wild west where anything goes and there are no rules.

So when someone clicks on a link in an article, it should give them something of value – additional information about a story or a company or service and not take them to a low-quality site that actually has nothing of benefit to offer. In other words, the link must be relevant to what they are reading, and shouldn’t take people to where they don’t want to go.

The message here is to make sure your target sites and links are appropriate for your sector as well as the content on your website. This way, you may be rewarded for high-quality links and gain traction in search rankings.

Mistake 3: Overusing Exact Anchor Text

Another of the big link building mistakes people commonly make is overdoing it with exact anchor text – hyperlinked text that leads to a page on your website and the precise term, or keywords, you want to rank for. Everything we do must be in line with SEO best practices, and here, we want the anchor text and link to correlate to the article they’re in, as well as fitting in naturally with the content.

Everything should flow well and be reader-friendly; if it’s not, and you’re sticking loads of exact-match anchor text in, it’s going to look strange and you could be accused of trying to game the system to get a rankings advantage.

It’s far better to play the longer, wiser game and do it right. So forget about black-hat SEO practices and focus on:

• The reader experience (UX). If it were you reading the article, would you be annoyed by the inclusion of irrelevant links or would you appreciate relevant ones providing you with more information?
• Relevance: Your anchor text, and the hyperlink, must be relevant to what’s being discussed in the article, not something that takes you off on a wild tangent.
• Diversity and flexibility: Mix it up and don’t always use the exact match of your keywords as the anchor text. Instead of awkwardly shoehorning it into the content, be flexible and change the wording around to match the sentence and paragraph, so it will be natural. Use a variety of anchor text, including exact-match; partial-match, which includes other words too; branded, which is using a company or brand name as the anchor text; and naked URLs – just the company’s website address.

Mistake 4: Prioritising Quantity Over Quality

Way back at the dawn of SEO – in 1997, a year before Google’s birth and when the now-defunct AltaVista was among the most popular early search engines – it was widely believed that having a large amount of backlinks was vital to ranking well.

We now know that’s not true, because as search engines’ algorithms became more sophisticated, they were able to detect big volumes of links that were spammy and therefore low-quality – a blatant attempt at ranking manipulation. And so the result was the opposite of what the sites wanted, as they dropped in rankings rather than rising.

The formula for avoiding this link building mistake is Quality + Relevance + Authority:

• Your backlinks should come from sites that have quality content.
• The links on the pages of the two sites — the target website page where your link is on your anchor text and the linked page of your site – must be relevant to each other.
• The target site should have such solid metrics as high domain authority and low spam score.

A small number of links to your site from quality sites will give you a far greater SEO benefit than a large amount of links from inferior sites. It may be quick and easy to get many links from questionable sites, but your efforts would most likely do you more harm than good. To secure high-quality links, consider:

• Reaching out to relevant, quality sites and blogs covering topics in your sector and offering to write a guest post on a subject of interest.
• Forging relationships with influencers relevant to your sector. They might be interested in trying your products and blogging about them, or posting snippets on social media.
• Creating quality content for your own site, such as authoritative blog posts that can be shared online and that other blogs and sites might want to link to.
• Using the various social media platforms to attract attention to content on your site.

Mistake 5: Building Links To Low-Quality Content

Let’s ask ourselves what low-quality content is, and how you might recognise it when searching for sites to place links on. It’s content – mostly articles, not videos, infographics or anything else – that provides almost no value to the user, and there’s little point being on the site at all. Look out for:

1. Thin content: short articles amounting to a few hundred words, or less, that are superficial and have no in-depth information. They’re often surrounded by intrusive ads.
2. Poorly written content: articles littered with spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, as well as having erroneous facts – demonstrating that the site owner doesn’t care about the quality of their content.
3. Irrelevant content: the site’s topics are all over the place and there is no focus or theme with the articles it publishes. This means it’s most likely irrelevant to users.
4. Keyword stuffing: read a few paragraphs of an article and you see the same phrase appearing, and in a way that’s not natural. This is the old trick of stuffing keywords in to try and dupe Google and get higher rankings — but the result is low-quality content that Google will penalise.
5. Duplicate and “spun” content: some website owners think they can get away with lifting – stealing – content from others, as it’s so easy to just copy and paste. But Google will know, and most certainly won’t like it. The same is true for “content spinning” — using other sites’ articles and shifting a few words and paragraphs around in the hope that it will be new and original. It won’t; you have nothing of value to offer; and your content will be deemed bad quality.

These are yet more link building mistakes to avoid at all costs. Instead put your efforts into sites that have worthy content that’s informative and of value to readers.

Mistake 6: Backlinks from Sites With Toxic Link Profile

Another of the main link building mistakes is getting links from sites that have toxic link profiles. What do we mean by that? These are sites that themselves have been engaging in shady SEO practices, particularly by having a large number of backlinks from other sites that are poor quality and spammy. It’s like a merry-go-round of nefarious SEO activity that benefits no one, including your site, if you have links from these types of dodgy operations.

How do you know a site has a toxic backlink profile? It might look fine, visually, and appear to have good-quality content, but the toxic links are unseen, lurking in the background — and you’ll need to use some SEO tool to get a look at them.

You can conduct backlink analysis, or an audit, with the tools we mentioned earlier – Semrush, Ahrefs and Moz – and they will identify any toxic links to a site. You can also examine the sites that are linking to the website you’re considering for your own links, seeing if they’re also of a dubious, spammy nature. Something else to look for is if a site has gained a significant number of backlinks in a short period – an indication it may have been up to something untowards, as good link building, to quality sites, takes time and is not about quantity.

So what happens if you do have toxic backlinks? You can expect:

1. A fall in rankings. Rather than gaining traction online, with your toxic backlink profile, you’re losing it and quickly slipping down the rankings for your website and keywords. Google’s algorithms will see the bad-quality links and return your website lower and lower in its search results, meaning less visibility.
2. A drop in traffic. If you’re not ranking well for your keywords, you’re not likely to get much traffic. So as you plummet further down search results, ending up on pages few people ever see, the number of visitors to your website is likely to dwindle. You may suffer a loss of revenue, and also advertising earnings, if you have ads on your site.
3. A Google Manual Action. This time a person at Google, not a computer programme (algorithm), has combed through your website and its backlinks and issues a penalty. It’s a serious violation of Google’s guidelines and your site may be removed from its index — and therefore search results – as long as the toxic backlinks remain.
4. Reputational damage. If your site is taken off Google, and you become known for having engaged with spammy websites and their toxic links, your company’s otherwise pristine reputation might suffer, both with your customers and partners. And along with a loss of reputation may come a loss of revenue.

Make a point of regularly checking your backlink profile, and if you find any questionable links, take immediate action, including by using Google’s disavow tool.

Mistake 7: Conducting Bad Outreach

Next up in our top 10 list of link building mistakes is not doing your outreach properly. Outreach is the process of contacting website owners or editors and pitching them an article (with a link to your website in it). Some websites get a large volume of pitches, and may be choosy about what they will accept – the bigger and better the site is, the more this will be the case.

To sidestep this link building mistake, ensure you:

1. Personalise your pitches. You’ll most likely fail at the outset of your outreach if you send the website owner or editor a generic email that doesn’t mention their name. Even worse if it’s sloppy, has typos and doesn’t acknowledge why you think it’s a good idea to have your article on the site – why you like the site in the first place and what’s good about it. You need to show you’ve researched the website and know what it’s about and who the audience is.
2. Avoid mass emailing. Less is more when conducting outreach, as quality over quantity is best. Instead of blasting out emails to dozens or even hundreds of website owners or editors, it’s better to write individual ones that allow you to address the person and make your pitch. You’re hopefully at the start of building a relationship with the person that will allow you to regularly have your content published on their site, and so the individual touch counts.
3. Offer value. Why should the website owner publish your article on their site — what’s the benefit for them? Briefly set out the reasons your content would be valuable for the website and its readers – a high-quality article people would find interesting and fresh and unique content for the site.
4. Follow up. Don’t give up if you don’t get a reply from the website editor or owner. If after a day or two you haven’t had one, send a gentle reminder, asking if they received your email and if your content is of interest. Sometimes people read emails and forget to respond; other times, emails go straight to the junk folder. A follow up could see your content published, and get you a good backlink.

Mistake 8: Links From Private Blog Networks

Of all the link building mistakes, getting backlinks from Private Blog Networks (PBNs) is right up there with the worst offenders. PBNs are a group of websites stemming from a central one, usually all with the same owner, and their purpose is to try to boost the authority of a website looking for paid backlinks.

PBNs may appear legitimate and have good metrics, including a high domain authority, but that’s mostly due to their practice of using high-authority domains that have expired. It’s another instance of black-hat SEO and may land you with penalties.

It’s not always easy to determine if a site linking to yours is part of PBN, although these are some signs that should set alarm bells ringing:

• Sites linking to yours all have the same design.
• The content on the sites is similar, or an exact match, as it’s duplicated across the PBN network of domains.
• Articles are poor quality, badly written and stuffed with keywords.
• No social media buttons on the sites, as PBNs typically don’t have accounts on Twitter, Instagram and other social networks.
• Shared IP addresses of a number of sites linking to yours.

Mistake 9: Creating Links That Are Not Editorially Placed

You may have seen links on a website that are not in the article but elsewhere, like in the comments section, footer or sidebar, and these are considered non-editorially placed, simply because the editor didn’t put them in the content. They’re another of our link building mistakes and perhaps an easy trap to fall into – why not drop a link into the comments, even if it has little or nothing to do with the story?

At the very least, Google might discount links in a page environment outside an article; at worst, you might suffer penalties and see your rankings drop – or get a manual penalty, if it’s something that’s being done regularly.

As with other link building mistakes, taking a shortcut and getting quick and easy backlinks is not the way to get ahead, and the reverse often happens. You want links to your site within the body of content, and on natural anchor text that’s relevant and enriches the user experience.

Mistake 10: Over-Optimising the Anchor Text

Now we come to the last of our link building mistakes: over-optimising anchor text in the hope of getting higher rankings for those keywords, as well as sales of products – a practice that, again, is likely to backfire and leave you worse off.

Here, we’re talking about instances where, say, you’re overdoing it with commercial keywords that people type into Google when looking to buy something – example: “buy running shoes”. The content then contains this anchor text multiple times, and reads as strange and out of place.

You can be sure Google will pick up on it and land you with a penalty. Instead, use a mix of anchor text types, including brand mentions, natural phrases and naked URLs, so that your backlink profile is not full of commercial keywords and is therefore natural and varied.

As we’ve seen throughout this article, adopting an honest and long-term strategy to link building campaigns is the best and only way forward. You’ve likely put a lot of work into your website, and it’s crucial to your company’s success, online and in the real world. So when you make these kinds of link building mistakes, you’re endangering your reputation and entire operation. Always make sure your backlinks are coming from the best possible sites, to give you the online advantage you need.