7 link building mistakes business make that can cost you.

Link building has never been so challenging and contradicting as it is today.

– You need backlinks to make your site rank.
– You fear of wrong backlinks that put your site at risk of Google's penalty.

To keep your link-building effective yet penalty safe, you need to instantly identify and neutralise any harmful links in your profile.

That is why today, to help you make sense of what's truly harmful for your site, we'll show you the 7 deadly link-building mistakes that may be poisoning your site now

Find and neutralise harmful links before they ruin your ranks!

1: Backlinks from pages with excessive (over 1,000) outgoing links

When a backlink page links out to hundreds and thousands of other pages, its value drops drastically. And more to that, massive outgoing links can be a sign of low-quality spammy blog or directory. These backlinks are suspicious and need a closer inspection.

2: Links coming from pages with the same IP (same C-class)

Many backlinks coming from sites with identical IP addresses may show that some of your links are attained via link networks — which is a red flag for search engines. Inspect you backlinks for IP addresses.

3: Too many links with exact match anchor text

Standard practice used to be: you'd aim for about a 30% to 50% match. Now those numbers dropped drastically. So, look through your backlink anchor text and take action if exact match anchors exceed 10%!

4: Overoptimised anchor text and lack of anchors diversity

Just as with exact match anchor text, Google frowns at backlink profiles with too many optimized link anchors. Make sure your backlinks have a variety of natural anchor texts (junk anchors, branded phrases, naked URLs, etc.) and review site's links for overoptimized anchors.

5: Sitewide backlinks

A high number of blog-roll, header, footer or sidebar links can trigger Google's "overoptimization" wrath, so keeping them to a minimum would be a rather reasonable thing to do. The fewer sitewide backlinks — the better, so mark them all in your backlink profile for revision and possible removal.

6: Backlinks from pages not indexed in Google

When a web page is not indexed in the search engines, it's possible it was banned for violating search engine's rules. Logically, having links from de-indexed pages is a red flag too. Stay away from banned pages and domains.

7: Backlinks from pages that look suspicious and weak

Beware of the pages that offer quick and easy link opportunities, without even looking at your site's content and moderating submissions. These backlink pages may contain in title/body such words as "forum," "link directory," "article directory," "links," "submit url," etc. On the whole, be cautious about pages with very low PageRank (zero or n/a) and backlink domains with short history.