Your link building campaign should be guided by the trio: highly targeted, high quality links - placed in the right spot on the page - with the right anchor text.

Most certainly, along the way you'll be tempted to make use of some practices that promise to deliver quick results but that also tend to raise some red flags with Google's quality standards.

Although beneficial on the short run, these gray and black hated backlink acquisitions will harm your SEO campaign and delay sustainable traffic from showing up in your charts.

List of "don't do"s to take into consideration:

1. Don't outsource your link building project unless you verify those you outsource to and they are qualified and aligned with your methods.

2. Don't search for "keyword phrase" and "submit site" in Google. The vast majority of results are garbage sites.

3. Don't just get links to your home page, get deep links to any page you want to rank well in Google; the ration should be 30~40% of links going to home page and 60~70% being deep links.

4. Don't use link building software or send mass emails for links.

5. Don't hire services which "guarantee" links or allow links added through automation. These kind of services are most likely intricate link farm consisting of a network of separate, highly interlinked websites for the purposes of inflating link popularity.

6. Don't automate link submission on your webpages; manually approve all link requests.

7. Don't approve a link request until you ensure that the site has not "faked" its PageRank. Also, verify the page has a current cache date in Google.

8. Don't burst the link volume on short periods of time. You want to make sure the number of links matches the amount of traffic you're receiving. Until your site is getting 500 unique visitors per day, I would stick to 5-10 acquired links per day max. In other words, avoid disparities between the number of backlinks to your website and the amount of traffic you're receiving.

9. Don't make backlinking decisions based on PageRank. Instead, build backlinks to provide complete solutions to your prospect's needs.

10. Don't go after generic keywords which are on the wrong end of the buying cycle. These depict a wide market without addressing specifics which the searcher has in mind (e.g. "buy car").

11. Don't search link partners among websites that are competing for the first 100 keywords in your niche market; the chances of getting a link from them are very slim because they are your direct competitors; descent to the next 300-500 keywords, instead.

12. Don't link to the home page of the directory you've submitted to; instead, link to the page where your listing appears.


13. Don't create so-called a "links page" where you build a page and stuff a bunch of links to "recommended resources", "links" or "get more information".

14. Avoid three-way linking schemes. Search engines are getting better at detecting and discounting these links. Google in particular has aggressively begun to target and discount three way links.

Assimilate these [url=http://trafficcpanel.com/737/14-points-dont-do-checklist-for-building-backlinks/]link building "don'ts
"[/url] and you're well on your way to conduct a successful Off-Page optimization campaign.

Visit my blog for a complete link building strategy.

lynda writes: I love the articles and tips I get from here. Although, I am a little confused regarding not to creat a links page. I thought this was a good thing...a resource page for your visitors. What is not good with this? Please let us know as others also want to know. Thanks

18:09:39 Tue Nov 10 2009 CST


Rob writes: "Don't create so-called a "links page" where you build a page and stuff a bunch of links to "recommended resources", "links" or "get more information"."

So does that mean I need to scatter all these links on other pages? I thought my neat list made it easier for visitors to see who I link to. I also have a "link to us" page giving the visitor the html they need to give me a back-link. Is this page also counter-productive?
Further detail on this would be appreciated.

7:51:03 Tue Nov 3 2009 CST


car rental writes: Thanks useful tips.

4:55:17 Tue Nov 3 2009 CST


ss0 Directory writes: Great article and I think its all very helpfull info but I dont agree with your second point:
"2. Don't search for "keyword phrase" and "submit site" in Google. The vast majority of results are garbage sites."
This can be a good way to find sites that will accept your niche links and I personally find that searches like this can give some good sites to link with.

3:22:33 Tue Nov 3 2009 CST


jiffy pop software writes: You should add competitive analysis to this list. See what your top competitors are doing for backlinking, then do it better.

2:45:48 Tue Nov 3 2009 CST


Ex Zurück writes: Regarding this:

"9. Don't make backlinking decisions based on PageRank. Instead, build backlinks to provide complete solutions to your prospect's needs."

I would especially recommend looking at the number and quality of backlinks a site has. If it has lots of backlinks - then more trust is passed to your site when they link to you.

2:06:55 Tue Nov 3 2009 CST


Sam Cohen writes: Can you please explain what we have to do whenever we will doing link building stuff? You have mentioned this things have to skip, Can you Please mention the next article, what we have to do? It will be very helpful for people those whom create Link Building stuff.

0:37:16 Tue Nov 3 2009 CST


Sam Cohen writes: This is a great information for link builders, I am doing much link building but did not get expected results I did not found any cause but now I got it. Thanks a lot, keep it up :)

0:31:21 Tue Nov 3 2009 CST


Web Design writes:
"Until your site is getting 500 unique visitors per day, I would stick to 5-10 acquired links per day max. In other words, avoid disparities between the number of backlinks to your website and the amount of traffic you're receiving."


Is this 1:100 / 1:50 some kinda of magical ratio?

0:28:30 Tue Nov 3 2009 CST


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