Sunday, July 5, 2009

5 Most Common Link Building Mistakes

After getting to know that link popularity is the most important factor that search engines consider when deciding your Pagerank, almost everyone has taken to posting their back links all over the internet. However, gaining credible link popularity that increases your page rank is really not as easy as it sounds and most people who do not know much about how Pagerank works keep creating text links that are either useless, or even harmful for their webpage. In order to make link popularity work for you, it is important to avoid the most common link building mistakes.

  1. Creating Links On Unrelated Pages.
    Search engines nowadays are smart enough to decipher whether your link is relevant to the users of the webpage that they are placed on or not. So if you are putting the text links of your webpages which are related to cooking on websites that deal with high end electronic goods, wrestling or real estate, you can be sure that these links will be trashed by the search engine, doing zilch for your Pagerank. So create links on sites that have related content. For example, if you have a cooking related website, placing links on home improvement, restaurant, recipe and kitchen equipment sites will be helpful.
  2. Creating Text Links That Proclaim,"Click Here".
    Google search engine spiders use the text on your hyperlink to determine what your website is all about and this plays an important role in determining both your Pagerank as well as your search engine rankings. By putting hyperlinks that simply say " click here for more information" or "know more here", you are telling the search engines that your website is about clicking and knowing more and that is where you will be ranked high instead of getting high search engine rankings for your own domain. Make it a point to use relevant keywords in your text links.
  3. Creating Links On High Pagerank Pages That Already Have Hundreds Of Links.
    Yes, it is true that the higher the PR of a page linking to you, the higher will be the value assigned to the link by the search engines and the greater will be your page rank. This is because the value or points that you get from a page that links back to you is determined by the formula — page rank of linking page / number of links on that page. But it is equally important to pay attention to the denominator of the formula, since a highly ranked page with lots of back links may end up giving you lower value than a page with lower rank but lesser links.
  4. Placing Links On Dynamic Pages.
    Web pages that are generated dynamically take ages to get indexed, and in all probability, a text link on such a page will never help in increasing your page rank. Identify dynamic pages by URLs with special symbols in them (&,? etcetera) and save your time by not posting any text links to your site on such pages.
  5. Creating Links On Pages That SE Spiders Cannot Crawl On.
    The whole point of building link popularity for increasing page rank is to make your site accessible to search engine spiders. However, search engine bots have not become smart enough to read pages generated by Flash or JavaScript. They are also unable to read text links placed within frames, so it is a complete waste of time creating back links on sites that are either Flash generated or framed, since these links would be totally ignored by search engine spiders.