Your Link Building Strategy Hurts Your Brand. Here’s Why

Link building is the most challenging part of SEO for a good reason — most SEO activities are quite predictable in terms of results, which is not always the case with acquiring backlinks.

Apart from that, you can often see digital marketers and experienced SEOs looking for faster ways of link building, and where do they lead? You end up with tons of spammy links that do more harm than good.

To make sure your link building strategy doesn’t turn into a complete disaster, I’ve put together a list of the 8 most useless (read harmful) tactics you should avoid at all costs. After all, caution is the parent of safety, right?

Let’s dive in.

What’s a Link Building Strategy?

A link building strategy is the group of techniques, tactics, and activities that digital marketers use to grow the number of backlinks (links on other sites pointing at yours) that are referring to the number of sites. The best link building strategies should generate a stable flow of high-quality links month over month.

Link building is an integral part of any successful SEO strategy, especially in a competitive landscape where your rivals are heavily engaged in building links, or if you’re up against major industry players like Microsoft or HubSpot.

Apart from that, the quality and relevance of your backlinks (a.k.a. backlink profile) remain one of the top ranking factors for Google. Backlinks serve as a «vote of confidence» for your website in the digital world. Search engines think that if authoritative websites are linking back to your content, then you must be a trustworthy place that is worth ranking higher.

In terms of the techniques and tactics themselves, I will not only list the bad ones for you, but will also highlight some of the best practices to improve the results of your link building efforts.

What’s Wrong With Link Building Nowadays?

The algorithms used by search engines to rank your website are changing. Constantly.

Besides improving the quality of search and the relevance of search results for their users, search engines also update their algorithms to combat spammy content and any other harmful practices that many «black hat» digital marketers use to get more traffic to their projects. I’ve encountered some fellow marketers who managed to earn thousands of dollars through AdSense by creating sites that were hacking the Google algorithm and got millions of visitors per month. I don’t have to tell you that it didn’t end well.

«One common issue I see is that 'legit' businesses like startups get inspired by the aggressive growth of burner businesses like 'MFA sites' (made of AdSense) but completely forget the long-term implications. The same rules are not applicable. 'Legit' companies need to think long-term and minimize risk, while burner sites can take huge risks for short-term gains.» — Kevin Indig, Growth Advisor, ex-Director of SEO at Shopify.

You may also remember that, in the past, marketers liked to overuse keywords in their pages (typical example below) or make link farms (websites with lots of links and low-quality, irrelevant content).

Fortunately, the updated search engine algorithms can now detect these sites and penalize such behavior.

The problem with modern link building is that many SEOs still heavily rely on outdated and inefficient strategies, not to mention the tactics Google frowns upon — paid links, generating tons of UGC links, building links on sites not relevant to your niche or those with low-authority, etc.

You might be asking yourself — if Google penalizes bad strategies, why do they still exist? Unfortunately, there is a demand for them since these tactics are relatively cheap and easily scaled. In its turn, organic link building requires time, immense effort, and access to resources.

Another problem is cost-effectiveness — it’s very unpredictable because of the poor scalability of most link building strategies capable of bringing meaningful links. Your SEO experts might spend hours preparing and sending thousands of personalized pitches and only get one or two links back. And even if you don’t bother much with personalization, getting tangible results from your link building campaign can still take two months or more. So, it’s a real challenge to predict the outcomes of an outreach campaign.

Thus, there is no straight road that will lead you to a goldmine of links, but in this article, I want to warn you from taking the paths that can land you in the trap of easy backlinks that bring good short-term results but can harm your website in the future.

8 Reasons Why Your Link Building Strategy Hurts Your Brand

If you’re planning to keep doing business under the same domain without changing it, following the link building strategies below could force you to rebrand and build an entirely new website.

Why?

Referring domains define how worthy your site is to be at the top of SERPs. Investing in low-quality links is a slippery slope that may give your website a boost at first, but you can’t expect it to last forever. So, you should only put effort into building links on websites that you would not be ashamed to promote on your social media.

Now, let’s get to our list of eight shady link building tactics to avoid.

Reason #1: Reciprocal links (I'll link to you, you’ll link to me) ?

Also known as link exchange, this practice is against the webmaster guidelines of most search engines for one obvious reason — it is artificial.

A backlink is great if it is organic and represents the value of your website. Organizing reciprocal links does not, by any means, indicate that your content, which the other website is linking to, is useful or relevant.

Link exchange is the process when website A gets a backlink from website B, and website B gets one from website A. If the Search engine detects an ongoing process of link exchanges on your website, be sure that you will get penalties. Google can spot the pattern if you’re doing excessive link exchanges since it’s pretty easy to connect the dots between sites linking to each other nearly simultaneously. Google tracks every time your page gets updated so, as a result, it’s quite easy to capture sites that are updating their existing pages simultaneously to link back to each other.

Reason #2: Excessive use of anchor texts with exact match for the target keyword ?

When other websites link back to your content using an anchor that exactly matches a keyword you are targeting, that might sound great at first, but if you get hundreds of such links, Google may see it as forced and done on purpose.

Constant repetition of exact-match anchors is very unlikely to happen naturally, and search engines know about it very well. Besides, direct anchors may cause a page to stop appearing in SERPs. For instance, take a look at this example of the page with a video marketing guide. The overwhelming majority of anchors in backlinks contain a direct keyword video marketing:

Despite all the efforts of search engines to detect and penalize this (Google even has a special form for reporting paid links), this practice is still very popular. According to a recent study on paid links by Ahrefs, around two-thirds of the blogs that responded to their inquiry confirmed that they sell backlinks.

Other than the penalty risk, websites selling links don’t particularly bother with growing their brand awareness or traffic, so making such an investment can close your link gap today but stop bringing results tomorrow. And I should tell you — paid links are not cheap. Here is a breakdown of prices by DR according to the same Ahrefs study.