Are you stuck in your past? Hanging on to the good old days of
link-building when SEO was simple and easy to understand? Whether for
good or otherwise, those days are done for, and with them, practices of
the old have gone too. Unfortunately, many of us still hold on to the
old link-building practices which no longer apply, and could prove to be
counter-productive to your SEO efforts. Here are some old link-building
practices that you need to get rid of!
1. Directory Submissions
Not all directories are bad. But the problem happens when you start
placing your site in directories like crazy - some of these directories
might not even be relevant!
Directories used to help search engines find sites, and as you can
imagine, such links mattered a lot. However, search engines have grown
huge, and no longer need to rely on those directories to find websites.
So the point of most directories now is moot.
Nowadays, only a handful of directories can be useful to a business -
those that have a sizable user base which uses the directory regularly.
For example, there might be a directory of businesses local to an
area/country, and users who use it to find businesses. In such a case, a
business in that region (and niche) might benefit from a listing. But
otherwise? There's no point for me to get my blog listed in a
tech-business directory based in Canada!
2. Generic Emails
We now live in a world of digital footprints. Blogs, social media,
search engines — these things make finding information on a person
extremely easy…especially bloggers. People no longer want to be
addressed as the masses - they want personalization and special
attention.
Many bloggers make the mistake of creating one single email campaign,
and send it to an entire list without stopping to think about who
they're reaching out to. If they can't take the time to do that, then
subscribers don't want to take time out for them.
And this is more true for bloggers and website owners than the layman.
When reaching out through email, take the time to find out exactly whom
it is you are reaching out to. Ask yourself who is the owner of the
site, what might they be interested in and how can they be reached.
Maybe they prefer social communication, or maybe they're not interested
in linking at all!
3. Looking at a website's PageRank value
PageRank is Google's way of measuring a page’s value. The goal of any
link builder is to find pages with a high value (or PageRank) to link
back. Link building services actually used to (and still do) charge not
just by the link but the PageRank of that link. The higher the PR, the
more costly the link.
Getting a high PR link nowadays doesn't mean the same thing as before.
Unless a high value link sends leads, is a major industry site and adds
value, it is a useless link. Just looking at the PR doesn't help
anymore. A lot of bloggers have this habit of opening up a directory,
and extracting a list of websites with the top PR. They then try to get
links from them, not understanding the importance of relevance.
When evaluating a website as a potential backlink, as yourself whether
the site and its authors are reputable, whether it has good incoming
links and a positive web presence, and if the content is well-written.
The answer to most of these questions should be Yes before you proceed.
4. Keyword-Specific Anchor Text
Anchor texts are supposed to tell the users and search engines what they
can expect to find on that next page. It was considered a good SEO
practice to place links on target keywords as anchor texts, and it
helped websites rank better. So many bloggers started using this
technique to spam search engines and
add keyword-specific anchor text everywhere they could. A phenomenon now referred to as SEO over-optimization.
Search engines now are smart, and no longer need keywords to help them
correlate links and websites. This is not to say that the inference
process is perfect, and that links are no longer valuable. But nowadays,
a straight-up URL might be almost as good as a keyword-focused link. I
say 'almost' because you cannot replace the all-important
focus-keywords, not yet anyway. But you don't want to over-do it either.
The point is, as long as it’s a good site linking to you, don’t be
concerned about what the anchor text says. Hell, if the NYT wanted to
link to my personal blog, I wouldn't care if it used 'xyz' as the anchor
text :P
So, do you still follow your old ways? After reading this post, you
should know better, and I hope it has helped you improve your SEO
practices with respect to link-building. Give us a shout-out in the
comments section below if you liked this post :)