In your quest to boost rankings, you may have engaged in aggressive link building strategies in the past. However, new search algorithm updates including Penguin from Google can reward such practices with harsh penalties.
Mentioned below are important link building practices that should be avoided to achieve improved rankings.
Many webmasters still continue to include extremely rich anchor text in backlinks. You should avoid using a lot of rich and repetitive text in your anchor links while focusing on a few backlinks with related high quality text instead. Search engines including Google have begun punishing such websites and you should certainly avoid falling into this trap.
In addition, your entire website should be filled with high quality content and links that catch the eyes of your target audience as well as major search engines in a positive manner. You need to monitor precisely how visitors interact with your website and constantly keep on improving the quality of content and links on your site for improved rankings. In case you outsource these services including writing articles and blogs then you need to ensure that you pay deserving writers appropriate dues to get top quality text on your web pages.
Google had already started punishing websites with links to article directories and if you still possess such links then you need to remove them quickly. In case you have problems in removing them, you can utilize the Google Disavow Tool that requests Google to ignore such links.
In addition, you also need to avoid linking up with low quality directories that do not command high authority in the eyes of Google bots. You should instead make sure that your presence is maintained on high authority websites such as Business.com, DMOZ, Yahoo Directory, and other similar sites. If you locate links to websites that have been merely created to catch search traffic and divert them to specific sites then you need to quickly extract your presence from such sites since most search engines now come down hard on such tactics.
You should also avoid including paid guest blogs especially those that have many links with rich anchor text in them. In case you do engage in guest posts, you need to ensure that the post is relevant to your website and is targeted to reach out only to top brand building targets.
In addition to targeting article directories with their recent updates, Google also frowns on blog carnivals that are basically marketplaces to share content such as articles, reviews, blogs, etc. You should also avoid a presence on such sites since this move will end up penalizing your rankings along with those of such sites.
Another tactic that may be frowned upon by Google in the near future according to indications provided by company engineers is infographics that are of low quality or do not bear any relevance to the website. While infographics offer an excellent option to promote your website in an eye-catching way, ignoring the quality and relevance of such infographics while merely concentrating on quantity could prove to be costly in terms of rankings in coming times.
Many webmasters also try to project their sites at an international level even though their websites target local markets. You too should avoid falling into the trap of including international links with rich anchor text if you do not plan to go global since this will only be considered as spam in the eyes of major search engines.
Your links need to be related to your business, need to add value and authority to your site, and need to be logically and naturally present on all designated websites. You should categorically avoid the above mentioned link building practices to achieve improved rankings.