Link Building Mistakes

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello, Arthur Fabik. I'm Michael Costin. Hi, Michael Costin. This is The SEO Show.

ARTHUR: How are you? I'm very well. How are you? Good. Very good. Excited. What are you excited about? We're talking about link building today. Everyone's favorite topic. I know how much you love talking about link building.

MICHAEL: So I'm cheered up. But listen, before we get into this chap, last episode, we promised everyone we'd do an intro for niche navigators. And once we finished recording, We went deep into the studio, Arthur, deep into the studio, deep into the studio. I would turn the lights off. Arthur really got in the mood. The lights were never turned off and he, and he literally didn't found his passion. He found his soul and he sung and we put together an intro.

ARTHUR: Are you sure you want to debut it now?

MICHAEL: Should I not?

ARTHUR: Well, like, wouldn't it be better to save it? I just thought because last episode, you're very happy with yourself. So, well, we, we, we did it pretty quickly. You did it. And it wasn't very quick. It took like 40 minutes.

MICHAEL: It did not take 40. We were looking at Jonathan Apples as well at the same time. Listen, this is Arthur singing. I bring you Niche Navigators intro. Pretty good. Anyway, moving on. Pretty good. Link building. So you can look forward to that next niche navigators. Oh, by the way, if you want us to do a teardown of your niche, navigate the waters of your niche. I don't know where Arthur's mind went then, but I'm talking about tearing down your niche for niche navigators. Send us a message at the SEO show.co and we will take a little look and we'll check out your niche and then play that intro music before we get into it. So sounds fun. We're not here to talk about, we're here to talk link building and the topic is link building mistakes.

ARTHUR: Mysterious.

MICHAEL: So what do we got, seven? I think it's about seven. We've got seven mistakes that we've seen people make or that we've made ourselves whilst link building over the years that we're going to run through. I'm going to let Arthur take over because I need to do a little off air hiccup. So you take it from here, please.

ARTHUR: Sure. So number one, stopping too soon. So this is something that we experience often with clients that we work with or people that we work with is people often stop too soon. It could be because they don't understand it or that they're scared or they don't realize that link building can be expensive. So they tend to pull back way too early and basically lose all the momentum that they've started to build in the earlier months.

MICHAEL: Not even just momentum. It's almost like that investment you did make was pointless. Like it's, you still have the links, but, um, if you don't ultimately get up into the top page, it's been all for nothing in a way.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Um, I guess that's why I said momentum in the sense that you've already invested this much time and effort into it and money, of course, that it's a shame to just kind of pull the pin just as soon as it's about to work really. Cause it can take six months, 12 months, however long. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So the best way to mitigate this is to look at, I'd call them soft metrics that indicate that your link building is working. Because obviously ranking and traffic is what you really want, but until you get there, how do you know it's working?

ARTHUR: Well, oh yeah, that's the thing. I think that's a lot of business owners will feel that, you know, they don't see tangible results really quickly. So they feel like they're getting scammed or not getting what they paid for.

MICHAEL: or right now with the economy being a little bit rocky, businesses looking to pull back wherever they can. An easy thing to be put on the chopping block is link bill. You know, what am I, what am I getting for this? You know, so I'm looking at soft metrics, like deeper page rankings, overall visibility in Google improving. Yes. you could look at things like DR, DA, that sort of stuff. It's just a metric from a tool. It doesn't really mean much at the end of the day that that's going up, but it is a sign that the links are having some sort of an impact, but just keeping an eye on, is your visibility increasing on the deeper pages? Cause keep at it. And those deep ones are going to push onto the first page.

ARTHUR: Yeah. And DRs can fluctuate significantly based on, you know, you might lose a link that you've had, like for years that's been removed because the page four afford that might drop your DR from, you know, 40 to 38. Um, so, or, or Ahrefs change the way they catch or they change. Yeah. The way all the database changes. So there's so many different reasons as to why DR might drop. Yeah. So search traffic, um, visibility, yep.

MICHAEL: Visibility, overall visibility is the best one. Um, this segways kind of kind of segways. into being too cheap is another mistake. So not investing enough, you know, people obviously want to keep their investment down as much as possible. Um, particularly when you're investing in link building for months and months and months and not seeing anything, you've got to fund that from somewhere. You've got to fund that from, you know, the cashflow in your business. You've got to invest in it and hope that the results come down the track. And the temptation can be to either A, not invest enough. So that just blows out the timeframe that you are building the links for. Or B, use cheap options to try and, you know, save a buck, which has a whole litany of problems attached to it. So, um, if it sounds too good to be true pricing wise, it probably is. And if you're not investing enough, so a good way to figure out if what you should be investing is maybe looking at your site in Ahrefs compared to the competition, looking at the shortfall between your site and their site in terms of the number of unique domains linking to it, and then allowing for say anywhere from 200 to 400 to $500 per link as a cost. I'd say yeah, north of 300. Yeah. It depends on what your approach is, whether you're doing it yourself, whether it's with an agency, but yeah. And then figure it out. So if there's like a hundred links that need to be built at $300, that's 30 K right there, but you need to invest in links. That's a good way of looking at it. That's a simple way. Right. So, and then if someone's saying, we'll do it for 500 bucks a month, what are you going to do? Invest for a decade, you know, close the gap.

ARTHUR: Well, I think it just goes back to people tiptoeing around the fact that links cost money, you know, placement costs, content costs, you know, just outreach costs. It all adds up. Yep. So people don't realize that we absorb a lot of those costs when it comes to link building. Yep. And I think that plays a big part in it. Because a lot of the time, if they don't know that, they just assume it's just a link. You know, how hard is it to get one hyperlink from one site to another? Like it doesn't seem like to lay person. Why does that cost money?

MICHAEL: Yeah. But as we know, website owners know the value of a link. They want their papers when you're reaching out to them. Most of the time they sure do. But, um, the way to get around that is the other thing I would say on that topic where I gave that example of, you know, looking at your competitors and all the rest of it, reach out to like three or four SEO agencies and get a quote. What do you think? How many links do I need? What's it going to cost? And as long as they're reputable, you should get a good idea. They're not going to tell you 500 bucks a month when you need to spend five grand.

ARTHUR: Or you could do it yourself if you have the time and the patience. If you're a sucker for punishment. Yeah. I wouldn't want to, but hey, someone might.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Look, if you're early on in your business journey, sure. But if you have a business, you have a marketing budget, you don't want to be doing that.

ARTHUR: Oh, what's the next one? All good. The next one is being aggressive with anchor text. So basically what that means is spamming the anchor text. I guess, let me start again. So spamming your anchor text with money terms or exact match anchors to try to manipulate or push up a specific keyword or specific page. So for, let's use it. I can't talk. Let's use a florist as an example. They might want to rank for flower delivery, Sydney. So spamming the anchor text, flower delivery, Sydney, to try to boost that up over and over again, month after month after month can get you in trouble or hot water. Yeah.

MICHAEL: You'll often see a spike, be happy days. Wow. We're ranking. And then you get hit by some change in the algorithm. That's it. So it's not worth doing. Like it needs to be a part of your backlink profile. Exact match anchor text, but it needs to be used strategically.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Sporadically. Well, yeah, that looking at your anchor text distribution. So I guess the ratio between, you know, branded anchors, URLs, money slash exact match brand. So making sure that it appears natural.

MICHAEL: What would you generally, I know it's a bit different for every niche, but what are we talking like 10%, 1%? What are you trying to keep your exact match or a exact match here? So let's say flower delivery Sydney. as an overall percentage of the portfolio backlink profile?

ARTHUR: Just that specific keyword, 1% I guess. Like 10% might be too many, too much, just for that one specific keyword. I'd say 10% for like exact match anchors generally, like flower delivery in Sydney, Sydney flower delivery, flower delivery, florist Sydney, like that, I think is fine. And then the rest would be a split of, you know, brand flower delivery. A guy we used to work with had a term for it. He called him like Halo or something. Halo. Yeah. I can't remember what he used to call him, but it's just basically combining brand and the money anchor. Right. Yeah. And then heavily geared towards brand URL.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And just random website.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: The, I would say one, one to 1.5% is what I sort of deem safe generally across all industries for just an individual. And if you go into a space and see that someone ranking is up there, you know, five, six, 8%, I'd be wary of saying, well, that one's working. So I'm going to copy that and, you know, be more aggressive with mine because it's usually the case that Google hasn't caught up to it yet, but they generally do in time.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: I've seen it heaps in the digital agency space. I've seen it heaps in multiple spaces, but the temptation can be when you're seeing someone going aggressive with the exact match anchor text to be like, Oh, I'm going to go do that.

ARTHUR: Well, if they're ranking first and they're doing it, then it is tempting to replicate that. Yep.

MICHAEL: But it's normally short term gain for long-term pain if you do that. Right. The next one moving on is, um, focusing too much on metrics. Cause we love our metrics in the SEO world. Always a good chat between SEOs. What metrics do you use? Oh, that's a good metric with links. You can be suckered into. Either A, believing metrics are good when really the site is shit. So an example might be a website tries to rank for an error code, software error code that has millions of searches a month. If it can rank on the first page for it, cause maybe it's not that competitive. Ahrefs will say, well, this site has tons of traffic because it's ranking well, but it doesn't really probably A, even have that traffic and B, it's not worthwhile. It's not like valuable site that's actually ranking well in Google. They're just trying to game the metrics because they know people that don't really dig too deep into it will buy links on it. The same goes for DR. Used to be the case. People would redirect, you know, high authority domains to a new domain and then the DR would update. and then they'd remove the redirect and that DR would remain high and then they'd sell links on the back of that. And then in time it all falls away and the site turns out to be a lemon. So A, relying too much on positive metrics. But then B, being too obsessed with like the negative. So let's say DR is only 10 on this domain. I'm not going to get a link from it, but it's a great domain. It's relevant. Let's say it's in Australia and you're an Australian website. Like there's plenty of reasons you should be getting a link. The real website run by a human doesn't have spam all over it, but you're so obsessed with metrics. Your DR cutoff is 20. I'm not going to get a link on that. Yep. Um, so each end of the spectrum can be a link building mistake.

ARTHUR: A hundred percent. I think, yeah, we, we look at metrics. I think they're still important. If you're doing it at scale, you need them to be able to have a look and assess different domains and use those metrics to cut off certain sites that you wouldn't even waste your time looking at. So for example, a site that has search traffic is less than a hundred for example, which means that barely any keywords are appearing and then DR less than 10. because otherwise you're just going through hundreds and thousands of sites having to manually manually assess them. So they serve a purpose, but I agree.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But being particularly as well, I would say if you're doing it yourself, you're not going to be doing it at that scale. So you can probably take a bit more time to assess each link.

ARTHUR: We also look at links in versus links out. So how many sites are they linking out to? So sites linking in, which I think is important.

MICHAEL: What countries are the traffic coming from?

ARTHUR: So a bit of a counter argument there for you, but.

MICHAEL: No, but I've argued both ends of it. So you can, yeah. Ignoring the metrics, bad. Focusing too much on the metrics, bad.

ARTHUR: So focus on the metrics a little bit.

MICHAEL: Yeah. I guess I know, I know what you're trying to say.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: If you, if you're not focusing on like when you choose not to focus on the metrics, it's because you're using common sense to decide that that link's still worthwhile getting because yes, as I said, good topic, relevant selling domain, real website owner, that's still a good link. Yeah. Whereas at the other end also use common sense. If all the traffic comes from India and it's a, coming on one keyword to a gibberish page and the website just has tons of links going out, then that's also bad. Make sure your metric game is dialed in. Yeah. There you go. That's what we should have called that point.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Manually assessing sites and domains can be painful.

MICHAEL: That's true. That sounds like a topic.

ARTHUR: How to assess a link or what makes a good link. Haven't we done that already?

MICHAEL: We have done that exact topic. Yeah. What makes a good link? Don't know what it is off the top of my head, but it was a while ago. Um, let's focus on the next one, which is quantity over quality being a link building mistake. quantity over quality.

ARTHUR: So people tend to focus on quantity. They want as many links as possible. You know, I want a hundred links. I want this many links per month. Yep. Not realizing that, I guess what makes a good link and neglecting the fact that, you know, people might have to get lower quality links to make up for that quantity and not get as many good links because they're too focused on the number.

MICHAEL: Yep.

MICHAEL: So this can often be aligned with. Uh, miscommunication or, um, I guess incentives on the sales side, I guess, not incentives, but things being miscommunicated on the sales side. So if someone gets the understanding or idea in their head that I need minimum 10 per month guaranteed, otherwise the SEO campaign is a failure. Then the pressure will be on the agency to just get any old link. You know, if they've only built three really good ones that month. and they'll pad it out with some directory links or something. Or some cheaper links. Yeah, whatever the case may be. Or the other thing could be where the business just wants volume over at all costs. So I want as many links as possible for my budget each month. Yes. Because it's like, it's the old school way of looking at things. Super old school these days.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I think, yeah, I used to work with a client on, well, clients on both ends of the spectrum. One where they were super, they looked at every single link. They were just focused on volume. And if you didn't hit that link target, you know, you'd hear, he'd hear from them and then get upset and you'd try to argue, you know, we're trying to go over, we're trying to go for quality of a quantity and they wouldn't hear it. It's just like in my contract that says I'm getting 10 links, I need 10 links. So it becomes problematic and you know, it's not a fun relationship to be in. Um, but then on the flip side, we work, with clients that understand that, you know, although we've been told this many links, we're focusing on quality. And those are the ones that tend to see better results because you're not so focused on trying to hit a target that you're just getting links for the sake of getting links or padding it out, like you said. You're actually looking at the link metrics, which you said not to look at too closely, but you're looking at the site. You're looking at all the things you're actually going through and having a look at the content on the site and making sure it's relevant. and understanding that that link might cost a lot more than three shitter links, basically, but you know it's gonna move the needle. So clients that are serious about SEO should be able to touch wood, understand that and agree. Sometimes it's better to go for quality over quantity. And on the flip side, if you get too stuck focusing on quantity, you risk getting poor quality links, which, well, best case scenario, we'll just get devalued and won't do anything. Worst case scenario might even damage you. So yeah. Yep. Sorry. I was going to say, look, I can understand as a business owner, if you're being sold in on this, your link building package, you get this, this many links per month. You want to see that, right?

MICHAEL: Because of the SEO world is so vague, you know, so having concrete deliverables or metrics attached to the service, Yes. Is it easy for a business owner to understand and hold people to account? I get that. And I get why sales people or agencies will package it up that way because it helps people feel confident that they're going to get something for their investment. Yeah. But, um, I guess education and, and. You know, if people really come into it with their eyes open and understand SEO and understand the strategy, then you might not need to be guaranteeing a certain volume of links per month because they understand what really needs to happen. That's where episodes like this come in or other link building episodes of the SEO show. But let's move on to point number six. I think it's six. Yep. Being sporadic. So being sporadic with your link building sort of ties into the first point, which was stopping too soon. If you do little blasts of link building here and there, then stop for four months, then do a little blast and then stop for a year, you are going to be up against it if competitors in your space are just consistently out there building the strength of their domain. Definitely. It should be looked at as something as a always on strategy or tactic.

ARTHUR: Consistency is key, basically. I guess the only time you can afford to be sporadic is if you've been link building for years and you've been aggressively link building and you decide to take a break because A, it looks more natural, like you're not always going to be getting certain DR links to certain pages. So taking a break is a good thing. But at the start of a campaign, you just need to be consistent. Yeah.

MICHAEL: If you're not ranking well, yes, then you need to be at it. And if your competitors are at it, you need to be at it.

ARTHUR: Well, that's the thing as well. Like, I guess even if you've been doing it consistently for years, you should always have a look and monitor competitor activity because if they're, if they continue to link board aggressively, they'll eventually overtake you.

MICHAEL: Yep. And we've seen it in the past where we have clients that are crushing it and then they stop pause for six months, whatever. And then you check in on them in Ahrefs and their traffic chart starts going down, down, down, down, down.

ARTHUR: Because it's, it's tempting as a business owner.

MICHAEL: Like look, I get, yeah, you maximize your ROI. If you pause SEO investment, but maintain your rankings, your ROI just gets better and better and better every day because you're making more and more money without continuing that investment. but then you're playing catch up. Until you're not, then it starts going backwards. And then often like we've found, you know, if someone pauses and goes away, they might not come back to us. They might go to like a cheap agency or something and then compound it by going out and doing bad work or getting bad links. And yeah, in an ideal world, SEO link building investments always on. Now I say ideal world, we're an SEO agency, so we would say that, but, If it's a zero sum game, Google, there's one first page of search results. There's one position one. And, um, if others are building links in your space and you're not, then in time, they're going to be the ones up there in one because Google rewards links, even though it says it doesn't. Well, they say they do, but they don't, they don't want to reward. You know what I mean? Let's move on to the final point here, which is ignoring context or relevancy. So this one to me is, I think the relevancy of the link, if a link is on topic in your niche, that's a strong link, regardless of metrics, like we said before. So using an example, if it's on a site, so for example, if you're a carpenter and you get a link from Tony's World of Wood, and that website is just dealing with Merbos and treated pine, and it's talking about different grades of timber. You want a link from that site. That's a great link. That is a beautiful link. Um, the opposite of that is ignoring that altogether and going out and, uh, for your carpentry site, getting a link from a cosmetic surgeon because you know them or something and just chasing sort of ties into chasing volume, quantity over quantity, that sort of thing. And I think, um, just not giving enough thought to context or relevancy is a mistake.

ARTHUR: Yes. I agree. Agreed. Definitely agree. Confirmed. Confirmed. Nothing worse than seeing a link that's kind of like inserted into just some random article that has absolutely nothing to do with that site or that link or that anchor. Yeah. I can't remember like what's, what's a good example.

MICHAEL: I saw one where it was a business that did a fire doors. Yes. Like fire escape doors of fire retardant doors. Yeah. And it had been re-imagined as a PBN and you land on it and you go in and it has an article on teeth whitening and then another one on like buy gold bullion. And it's just the link is so tenuous to the overall theme of that. So it's not even, I don't think there was even a link to the concept of fire doors. It's just articles on that, on that site. That is shit.

ARTHUR: Yes. What about sites like general sites, maybe blogs? So the actual content is relevant, linking back to a relevant site using a relevant anchor, but it's on a site that talks about like a general site that talks about different topics. So like parenting, money, business, like DIY. What do you think? Does that still pass on value or?

MICHAEL: Yes. Yep. It does. I would say that they're going to be bread and butter in a lot of people's link building campaigns. Once you've exhausted niche, really, really relevant stuff. Yeah. Cast the net a bit wider. Yes. Um, it's like a, I guess if you get some publicity, let's say you're an airplane manufacturer, bit of a niche you get featured in Aviation Weekly. If that's a real thing, probably that's a great, that's a great feature. Yes. But if you also got featured in men's health for some reason, also a good feature cause there's, it's could be crossover there with the audience. That's the same sort of thing. Cause there's going to be a limited supply of the aviation weeklies. So then you move into other areas to try and get your links from.

ARTHUR: Yeah.

MICHAEL: What do you reckon about that?

ARTHUR: No, that's good. Pretty good. Because yeah, there are a lot of sites that are general sites or mummy bloggers that cover a whole range of different topics and categories. I think at the very, very least, make sure that the links coming from an article or content that is related to whatever you're linking back to. Not just shoehorned in an article on like a kid's birthday ideas and then linking back to personal injury, personal injury lawyers. If you slip over during a birthday party or something like that.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Which happens all the time. Yeah. Those types of things.

ARTHUR: Do you think that works though?

MICHAEL: Like, yes, but in time it's the sort of thing that catches up with you. especially when it's exact match anchor text like that.

ARTHUR: So in a situation like that, avoid it altogether or use brand.

MICHAEL: Yes. Use brand, use a like naked URL. But if you're working with an SEO agency that's doing link building on your behalf and they're putting that sort of stuff in front of you, that should give you calls to be like, Hey, what is this all about? Can we change this up and go for something a bit more quality?

ARTHUR: What's the highest quality link you've ever gotten for the best link you've ever gotten?

MICHAEL: Well, the best one was I got from uber.com to your, which I had a VPN affiliate site.

ARTHUR: So this is a good example of someone like Uber linking back to a VPN site. Yeah.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But, um, it was a branded link.

ARTHUR: It was the image link, wasn't it?

MICHAEL: Yeah. So I've used the, uh, image, uh, creative commons licensing trick, which we've done an episode on that as a topic, but the Uber blog linked to me dr 90 something. That's probably the most sexy link I've ever built. Very good. What about you?

ARTHUR: I can't think off the top of my head.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Not a mummy blog. You got a favorite mummy blog.

ARTHUR: Uh, no, I don't have a favorite mommy blog.

MICHAEL: There's one names always stuck in my head across all the years. Kelly's thoughts. I've seen that name over the years.

ARTHUR: Don't know. Don't know if it's good. My favorite link I ever built was when I first started link building and it was for, uh, what was the, it was a liquor store. I can't remember what they were called. Yeah. They're still around. It was, Doesn't matter, irrelevant. But basically I found a bunch of bloggers that blogged about wine, hit them up on, what was it? Facebook and actually got a free link on a like DR 40 site, just talking to them and like engaging with them actually had to send them like a bottle of wine. But that was like a, my first link that I built and it was, One that stuck with me. You always remember your favorite. Cause it was super, super relevant. It was a blog about just wine.com.au to a local wine store. Did you win link of the week for that? I did. I think you must have. Yeah. That's the link of the week material right there.

MICHAEL: Yup. Maybe we should bring back link of the week. We have the trophy.

ARTHUR: No, we don't.

MICHAEL: Halfway there. Yeah, we do somewhere. Thank you.

ARTHUR: that new one that we got. Well, we stole that from the agency we used to work at, but they don't exist anymore. So it doesn't matter, I guess.

MICHAEL: All right. On that incriminating note, let's move on and wrap up this week's episode. Hopefully you've learned a little about link building mistakes, so you don't make them in your world. We'll be back next week with another episode of the SEO show, but until then, happy SEOing. Bye. Bye.

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