Oxygen Marketing provides professional link building services for our SEO clients.
Link building is a vital component of SEO and thus should play an important role in any SEO campaign. We get asked a lot about link building strategies, so we have compiled the following information to answer some frequently asked questions.
Backlinking Myths You Should Ignore
There can few aspects of online business and marketing that have as many myths, half-truths, misleading advice, and downright lies, as SEO. Note these usually all come from people who do not really belong anywhere near a website or who are simply out to cause you problems.
Within SEO, each element of it has their own collection of fables and tales, and that most certainly includes link building. Given that link building plays such an important role in SEO, it is little wonder that confusion exists for many business owners trying to get their head around improving their website’s ranking.
Some of that wrong advice may simply waste their time as it does nothing to improve things, but more seriously, some of it can actually harm, rather than benefit, a business’s SEO.
To try and clear away a few of those myths that we mentioned at the start, here are three which seem to still be doing the rounds, even though they have been disproved and shown to erroneous, many times.
Backlinking Myth #1:
“Your Site Will be Penalised If You Build Links Too Quickly”
Let us imagine you create a totally awesome piece of content. You publish it online, and it suddenly becomes the talk of your niche, and as a result, it gets shared across hundreds of websites and social media accounts.
On each occasion it gets shared there should be a link created, and as all those shares are likely to happen over a noticeably short period of time, all those links will appear relatively quickly too.
The point we are making is that it is possible to have lots of backlinks created quickly, but if they are being created organically, and as a result of others taking action like sharing your content, Google is not going to flag that as an issue.
In fact, there are thousands of examples of content going viral and the backlinks created from that have sent a website’s ranking upwards at an extremely fast rate.
What will not work though, is if you use some spammy method that literally manifests a load of links out of nowhere all pointing to your website. That will get flagged and could see your website earmarked for a ranking penalty.
Backlinking Myth #2:
“You’ll Be Penalised For Links From Websites Outside Your Niche”
The word relevancy gets used a lot in SEO circles and there are lots of reasons for that. It will apply to things like content being relevant for search terms, and where you want the keywords you rank for to be relevant to your business.
When it comes to building links, it certainly adds some strength to your ranking if any of the links to your website are from websites that are for businesses or organisations that are related to your business category.
However, that does not mean that every single link to your website has to be from within your niche. In other words, if you are a vet, all your links do not need to come from other vet websites.
Think of the false logic in expecting to see every link that goes to a website, only emanating from another website within the exact same niche. It is utter nonsense and even Google do not see it that way.
If you can get backlinks from high authority sites, and the anchor text can be used to justify why it might link to your website, then take them. Remember, relevancy is only part of the picture with regards to backlinks, with authority and diversity of links also playing a significant role.
Backlinking Myth #3:
“You Should Use Exact Match Anchor Text In Every Backlink”
It defies belief that some so-called SEO experts still peddle this myth, but it still does the rounds on forums and social media pages.
If you are unsure what is meant by exact match anchor text, it means using text within a backlink that exactly matches the keywords you want to rank for. An example might be a landscape gardening company in Perth that wants to rank for the term ‘landscape gardener in Perth’.
What they would do is create content that included that phrase and then create a link within that exact keyword. The content might read, ‘Homeowners are coming to the realisation that finding a high-quality landscape gardener in Perth whose prices are competitive, is not easy’
The words ‘landscape gardener in Perth’, would have blue text to indicate they are a link, and if someone clicked on it, they would be taken to the target website.
Now, if all you did was create backlinks that only ever had the exact match text you want to rank for, Google would soon flag this. The reason they would flag it is it screams to them “Over Optimisation!’.
If you think about it, how natural does it seem that every link to a website is going to have identical anchor text using the exact same keyword phrase?
Link building should be done to appear as natural as possible and that includes having diversity within your links. Using variations of your keywords, or using raw links which simply have the URL, are just two ways you can achieve this.