Link Building Mistakes to Avoid in Google Panda and Penguin Age

October 19, 2012 - Last Modified: March 29, 2014 by Anil Agarwal

Since introduction of Panda and Penguin updates from Google, lots of link building techniques have not only lost their effectiveness but may even harm your website rankings on Google and other search engines. You need to make sure you are building panda and penguin free links for your website. Today I’m going to share some link building mistakes you should ignore if you want to survive and want to take your website traffic to the next level in today’s search engine world.

If you are continuing with the link building methods, which you were using years back, you are inviting Google to place some form of penalty on your website. This penalty may appear in the form of lower rankings for targeted keywords, drop in page rank and decrease or complete de-indexing of your website contents from Google search results.

Generating too Many Links using the Same Anchor Text

I still notice lots of link builders and internet marketers create too many links for their targeted pages, using the same anchor text. If you are doing so, you are forcing Google to place an over optimization penalty on your website.

Ideally, you should be building backlinks for your website in a natural way. You actually need to kill some of your SEO skills a bit. When you are building backlinks, you should mix all type of anchor texts. Suppose I want to get top rankings for a keyword Easy WP SEO plugin on Google, I may go ahead and build backlinks using the following anchor texts:

easy wp seo
easywpseo
easy wp seo plugin
download easy wp seo
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Know more about this onpage plugin
Click here to download this seo plugin
Click here to buy this plugin
Read more about this amazing seo plugin
….
….

I hope you get a better idea about the type of combinations, you should be using to build natural looking backlinks for your website now. If are still building backlink using the same keyword over and over, that clearly shows you want to gain search engine rankings by generating lots of backlinks using the same keyword. If someone is linking to your website naturally, he can use any word to link to that page. He can even use any junk keyword like click here, read more and more details etc or whatever comes to his mind.

Buying Links

No doubt, this point has no direct relation with any of Google recent updates. Still I am including it in this list as many people make the mistake of buying links from other website with the intension to get higher rankings on Google and other search engines. You may enjoy higher rankings after buying some targeted backlinks from other websites in your niche. If Google sense you are involved in any form of link buying or selling activities, it will impose a huge penalty on your website.

In the past as well, Google placed a manual penalty on small and big brands like Overstock and Forbes for being involved in paid link building activities.

Doing Massive Link Exchange

Doing massive link exchange will be counted as a bad practice keeping in mind the kind of algorithmic changes Google is carrying out these days. If you want to do link exchange, do it with very few websites and only those relevant to your own website niche. It should be done to share value-adding websites with your reader and not for the sake of getting higher rankings for your website on Google and other search engines.

So you should think about your readers before making decision about a link exchange request.

Ignoring Social Media Links

No doubt, we were able to get top rankings on Google for even competitive terms in the past without using any social media network. However, if you are still thinking of a similar scenario, you are making a big mistake.

In today’s search engine world, social media signals have become very important and you must have a strong presence on popular social media websites if you are dreaming of getting a top ranking for your website on Google and other search engines. You can drive lots of targeted traffic, brand awareness and much needed link juice for your website from these websites.

Using Cheap Services like Fiverr for Bulk Link Building

In the past, some people were using Fiverr.com type of websites to build thousands of profile or forum type of links for their websites. If you are still doing or thinking of using services that promise to build thousands of backlinks for your website in quick succession, you are making a big blunder.

Links created through such services are going to backfire immediately.

Submitting your Website or Content on Panda Hit Websites

You must be still submitting your website or content on other websites with the intension to build some targeted backlinks for your website. Are you sure, you are generating links for your website from Panda free websites? If you end up getting links for your website from Panda or penguin hit websites, you are not doing anything good for your website.

So, you need to check traffic trends for that website to know whether a particular website is hit by recent algorithmic changes from Google using the tools that are mentioned on this page.

Building Sitewide Links

No doubt, sometime back, sitewide links were considered as one of the easiest ways to get higher search engine rankings and improved page rank from Google. But that practice will work no more in today’s web world. You need to stay away from such practices.

You need to make sure you are not intentionally building sitewide links for your domain from blogrolls or sponsored sections that are placed in a website sidebar or footer section. When you are getting sitewide links from a domain carrying thousands of pages, you will end up getting thousands of backlinks to your website using the same anchor text. This may convert naturally looking backlinking profile of your website in to SEO optimized one.

No doubt, there must be additional link building mistakes that I forgot to mention in this guest post. If you know of any, do share in the comments section below. By now, we have talked about the mistakes we should avoid while building backlinks for our website. But in case you want to know how you should build backlinks for your website in Google panda and penguin age, do check this post.

About Anil Agarwal

Follow @bloggerspassion

Anil Agarwal owns BloggersPassion blog where he shares blog tips around Wordpress including choosing domain name, best Wordpress web hosting solutions, premium wordpress plugins and themes etc.

{ 22 Responses }

Brenda says:

Indeed a great post about link building mistakes. Link building is the most effective part of ranking any website to the higher pages in search engines like Google. Without having right backlinks, We cannot bring our site or post at higher position. Most people think that buying links is a link building mistake but I don't think so that It is a mistake because there are so many internet marketers who are doing it the right way and also getting benefits from it without having any issue. Rather I must say that building too much backlinks in short span of time is a mistake because I have personally experienced it, Google sand boxed those sites who tries to build more links in short time. Either way, Thanks for sharing it with us. :D
Ugan says:

I don't agree with the not using Fiverr. Fiverr is not the problem, but rather some of the sellers there have really bad gigs that if used will only ruin you backlink strategies. I dont use Fiverr myself, colleagues of mine do and have had splendid results (post panda and pengiun) The trick is picking the right quality gigs over the bad ones.
Mathew says:

With all of the Google changes in algorithms it can be overwhelming so sometimes I like to go back and look up what it's all about again because I forget. That's how I landed on this page and it helped me a lot. I would be polite but last time I did your spam filter called me a spammer so I will leave my kind words out this time.
shasha says:

Anil, Found some really useful tips on backlink building here. May i know how to find whether the is site effected by panda update or not?
Kyle Kam says:

Google Updates now are so hard to read. You can't be sure what Google may throw at you for the next update. I suggest to just avoid using the same keywords because that's the main target of the Google Panda. It's barely lethal to do keyword stuffing also.
Siddartha Thota says:

Most of the time, bloggers get over anxious watching the offers like 2000 links or 3000 links from specific source like forums or comments or other things for just $5 or so, it is our tendency obviously. But I got to agree with the author that even after ignoring these kind of bulk linking strategies, we have to be careful while developing the seo strategies and we also make up our mind with few alternative steps that we need to do, because SEO is all about assumptions and conditional statements. Great Post once again :)
Rajesh Namase says:

I'll surely follow these tips while building new links, I'll try to avoid links with same anchor text, also I agree cheap SEO services provide backlinks which are useless.
Dean Saliba says:

Buying links has always been frowned upon by Google though, hasn't it? I didn't know that Google will penalise you if you generated too many many links with the same keyword, that certainly surprised me to discover that.
Govind says:

Great post Anil. It\'s true that after introduction of Panda and Penguin some of the link building techniques which was used before has effected the rankings of the websites. Thanks for sharing what mistakes should be avoided in linking building in this Google\'s Panda and Penguin Age.
Dimitriou says:

Hello, I agree with social media, especialy google plus, that is a google's product
bert says:

These are link building mistakes you should NOT ignore if you want to survive. Sidewide links, for example, will indeed be contraproductive.
Nick Stamoulis says:

The link building focus should be on building links where target audience members are actually spending time. These links will not only improve SEO efforts but will also help to generate traffic.
Nishadha says:

I think all these points highlight that you should have a natural looking link profile. Because of websites reliance on Google for traffic rankings are critical and everybody build links. To build links and look natural is a hard task, and these points will surely help to avoid penalties.
arun says:

Yes after panda, penguin and google emd penalty, link building is not a easy task and the above tips clearly reminds what not to do in future if you want to keep your site safe from penalties.
Tommy Griffith says:

Really liked this post. Matt Cutts recently announced the launch of the disavow tool at PubCon in Vegas. You should create a post on how the disavow tool works, and the implications in a post-Penguin world. Link building as dramatically changed over the last year or so, and you have some great call-outs here.
Gautam says:

Hmmm these points must be shared As many blogs are doing mistakes like this....they need to be particular while link Building...and you have shared some best Points..
Harshit S. says:

I tend to agree with most of your points Anil. Most bloggers are especially unaware of the harm their site could undergo if they build too many spammy links.
Robert says:

That's a great list of thinks not to do's. One thing I want to add is link velocity - it's important to build backlinks at a steady pace. There are still lots of people who build 50, 100, 200... links in one go and then nothing for a month or two and then again a big chunk of links in one go. This doesn't look natural and Google recognizes those kinds of unnatural link building patterns.
- Anil Agarwal says:
  
  That's true Robert. We need to be consistent with our link building efforts. If we are building lots of links in one go as you mentioned, will look spammy behavior to Google and search engines.
Kulwinder Singh says:

Agree with you bro, buying backlinks and exchanging them is not useful in these days. We have to build natural backlinks for our blogs with different backlinks.
Jena Isle says:

These are good pointers for all bloggers. I now have an idea on what appropriate anchor words should be used to link bank to my old posts. I was thinking of using Fiver because I thought it is an advantage, thanks for the heads-up. I think links from your about me page on forums and popular blogging communities could help in building your blog. A link from Yahoo's popular forum pages is an advantage. Don't you think?
- Anil Agarwal says:
  
  Ideally you should not depend too much on one type of links. It should not be the case like you end up getting too much links (in thousands) from your profile page on different forums. You should be fine with blogging communities. With forums, its abut helping others with your knowledge or take others help in fixing up your queries and at the same time use your link in the signature section.

Link Building Mistakes to Avoid in Google Panda and Penguin Age