10 Link Advice Tips you should ignore 785X391

At some point in your digital marketing efforts you are going to want to learn about links. So the first thing you do is start looking on popular web marketing forums and blogs, or even technology websites for tutorials or tips on how to get quality links to your site.

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Well, we’ve got news for you – getting links is not all that easy, and even the people that have been in the business for a while, try to look for new ways of getting these. Problem is the webs still doesn’t have professional standards for web marketing tasks. So when you get advise, often you’ll find illogical and even dangerous advice on how to get good backlinks. Truth is you just don’t want to settle for just any advice when it comes to backlinks because some of this common advice can be ill advice.

Basically, we believe most links have value, providing they are links that offer relevant information that can be of value to you and don’t come from a website that is all spam. So here we’ll list a number of tips that might have been true at some pint but just don’t really measure up; or a few misconceptions or misrepresentations of link building. Following this advice is not going to get you the results you want so you want to be wary of these thoughts and ideas when you come across them on the marketing forums.

1. Use Ratios to Metricize your Link Analysis

Ratios don’t offer a good analysis of your links. In fact, they don’t mean much. No one can really tell you if a link is trusted or not by a search engine, not unless they work at the search engine. There is really no such thing as a bad link (unless it goes nowhere).  Most people saying what a bad link is are selling you a tool for removing a bad link so they have a vested interest in their explanation.  However, there are certain types of links that could influence a search and may be spammy. But that doesn’t mean they actually hurt your website. Unless you’ve actually been penalized, you shouldn’t worry about removing links to your website.

2. Do not Accept Foreign Language Links

Do not Accept Foreign Language Links
Search engines don’t treat all out of language links as bad. You wont necessarily be penalized or downgraded for non English links. You shouldn’t manipulate links just to get search engine results. Having said that, you can use non-English links to refer relevant audiences to your website and to get quality backlinks.

3. Check the PR of a Site that Gives You a Backlink

Too many experts still consider this to be important and they tell you to only look for high quality PR links and that links form low PR sites are bad. This is a misconception as search engines don’t just look at a page’s PR rank, but also consider other factors when considering a link is good or bad.

4. Avoid Using Keyword-rich Anchor Text

Yes, it is true that the sole pursuit of keyword rich anchor text can land you in the penalty zone, but that doesn’t mean that all keyword rich anchors are bad. When it is appropriate, you should use one. Put simply, don’t go out of your way to avoid relevant anchor text. It’s like walking 10 blocks just to find a good place to cross the street.

5. Get Deep Links To Your Internal Pages

Get Deep Links To Your Internal Pages
People will naturally link to your pages if you have good content on it, so you should stop following this advice. If your content is compelling it will earn those links, but if you think in terms of “I need to create deep links to my internal pages, you just aren’t doing it right any longer. Besides when you track those links and find that most are to your home page but not to your internal pages then you might need to make these more likeable.

6. Avoid Getting Sitewide Links

This rule came from a time when people bought sitewide links, later this earned them manual penalties. Today people worry when sites link to theirs hundreds or even thousands of times from different pages of the same site. But as long as you don’t directly buy or request these sitewide links, you don’t have anything to worry about.  Today there are large sites that link to a personal site and do so from many different pages. You won’t get penalized for relevant links from any site that likes you enough to link to your site many different times. If you earn a link from someone else, you should welcome any and all links they are willing to give you.

7. Get As Few Links from a Domain as Possible

This just doesn’t make sense. If you have earned a link from another site you should welcome it. All quality earned links are valid. The search engines may assign a decreasing value to multi-links from one host but that doesn’t mean these are bad, providing they are naturally earned and valid links. Additional links from one website are still creating visibility for your website.

Actually, it is the websites that are actively spamming the search engines recommend only one link from any given domain. But what they don’t realize is that quality will win out. If you gain someone’s respect and admiration, it is only natural that you win more respect from them with other good webpages.

8. Don’t Get Links from Irrelevant Websites

Irrelevant Websites
This isn’t very good advice either. Sometimes people way overthink the relevance for links. You shouldn’t turned down a link from an irrelevant website, if it’s the kind of link that will help you. For example, you wouldn’t want to say no to yelp just because you don’t run a business directory. Nor would you turn down a link from CNN or the Huffington post just because you’re not a news website. Of course, you don’t want links from spam websites, but a good link from Chamber of Commerce, a city guide, or professional association is always helpful.

9. Avoid Interlinking Your Websites

This is another misconception that just won’t die. Sure if you have more than 50 websites then you shouldn’t interlink them all. But if you have five websites and want to mention them in the footer and that’s fine. You can do it. You can even link the other pages on a page such as the about us page. Sure you want to interlink your websites, especially if your readers might find value in your other websites.

10. Any Website Link is Good

Truth is, you do want to be careful in choosing the websites that link to you. For example, a client once asked us to look at a blog as he was unsure about the quality of such a link source. We agreed that these were not the kind of links he wanted and the reason why was simple.

You never want to accept links from websites that you don’t think are quality websites. The best links is the kind of link you would give yourself. If you have ever linked to another website just because you like the content that is a good link. Good link is not wrapped in metrics, however it does come from a website that offers value to its readers.