SEO is not just about link building as Google’s Penguin update has demonstrated. However, that doesn’t mean that links are not still a major ranking factor in most search engines.
What this means is that you should be careful when building links for your website. Getting links from just anywhere won’t do.
Here are five link building tactics that you should avoid in 2019 if you want to get a better rank for your website.
There was a time when exact match anchor texts were considered a great ranking factor. For instance, if you wanted to rank for ABCD EFGH, getting as many links as possible using ABCD EFGH as anchor texts would boost your ranking by a lot. But, as marketers started abusing this method, Google dropped the ranks of the websites that used a lot of exact match anchor texts.
Best practice these days is to have different anchor texts for a particular link as it seems more natural to the Google. The reason behind this is that different people would hyperlink a particular piece of content in different ways.
A simple URL structure like domain.com/page makes it more difficult for a search engine to understand what the URL is about. But a categorically structured URL clearly shows what it contains both to the Google and to the users. The pages on your website will also be treated with the same importance if they have the same URL structures.
There was a time when keyword based domains were a boon to search engine marketers. As getting ranks for a brand name with particular keywords was difficult, webmasters used to create keyword based domain names like londonwebsitedesigner.com. In less than a month, they had their websites ranked. But as Google adjusted its algorithms, it became difficult to rank for a keyword based domain. Apart from that, this technique is not brandable either.
Except for some high-authority link directory sites, getting links from article and link directories is no longer as useful as it used to be. They can actually harm your ranking. Long ago, directories helped to categorize websites so that people could arrive exactly where wanted. But as they don’t provide any real value to visitors today, they have lost their effectiveness.
Article directories are even worse today. They originally were meant for sharing unique and beneficial information to get the readers interested. But soon, marketers started rewriting the same content and submitted them to numerous directories simultaneously, flooding the web with low-quality content.
If you have been doing a lot of article and directory submissions, it’s past time to change tactics and focus more on getting links from niche-specific directories.
Getting links from another site are like votes of confidence for search engines. ‘You vote for me and I will vote for you’ is known as reciprocal linking. But what many marketers have overlooked is that Google values in-content links, not a huge list of links published in the categorical pages, offering no value to the visitors. This means reciprocal linking is mostly useless.
Last but not the least, there’s no universally recognised link building tactics. You may find some methods beneficial today but harm your site in the future. Try to focus more on creating high-quality content and build relationships with people so that they feel like linking your content themselves.