Link building is the most common off-site SEO technique, mainly because it is a very important factor that affects page and search results rankings. Most webmasters believe that link building is easy and can be done by everyone… even by robots.

The truth is far from this thought…

Link building needs skill and knowledge, otherwise it cannot be effective. Let’s see the most common link building myths and mistakes.

Top 3 myths and mistakes

Myth #1: Using bots is effective

There are a lot of bots and softwares that build your links automatically creating profiles, wikis etc. Those robots can create hundreds or even thousands of new links per day, but unfortunately it is useless to use them.

Here is the reason why:

1. Google evaluates only natural link building. Anything that is flagged as “unnatural” growth get penalized.
2. A site’s rankings are affected only by relevant backlinks and not by backlinks in general.
3. Only high quality backlinks are counted. Inbound links that are generated automatically and come from low quality and/or spammy sites can cause a rank decrease or even a ban

Myth #2: Only DoFollow links are useful

Even though Google and lots of other search engine bots follow only dofollow links, this doesn’t mean that nofollow links are useless. This may seem a bit contradictory, but it is really not…

Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team, recently said that GoogleBot is getting smarter and it is able to find citations for a site even without a link! This means that if, for example, the site of New York Times mentions ilianalola.com in an article and it does not add a link, GoogleBot will understand this and give credits to ilianalola.com by listing it higher in SERPs or even by giving it a higher PageRank.

Myth #3: Blog Commenting is the best link building strategy

Blog commenting is a way to build backlinks easily and quickly, but it is not enough to be counted as one of the best strategies.

Here is why…

Pros

1. It is easy, anyone can do it
2. It is quickly
3. It creates a strong blogging community
4. Except from backlinks, it can also create traffic
5. It creates authority, makes you an expert on your field

Cons

1. It can be time consuming until you find high quality relevant blogs to comment on
2. If it isn’t done correctly, your comment will be flagged as spam (for blog commenting techniques please read “Blog commenting as a link building strategy”)
3. It should be combined with other link building techniques (guest posting, article marketing etc.)
4. It should be implemented with moderation in order not to get banned or penalized by Google

There are many more link building mistakes, but first things first… let’s start from the basics. An other time we will go through all link building mistakes to avoid.

About

Iliana Lola is a full time internet marketer and writer and the owner of Ilianalola.com.

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