2021 is approaching, and so are several sectors, getting ready with their new milestones or goals to be achieved in the coming new year, and the SEO industry is no exception.
In 2020, we realized that Google rankings are important than ever for the business? success. But at the same time, Google penalty is another reason for the performance drop in search rankings that laters results in lower organic traffic and hence, affect your business and its overall performance in the digital market.
Google penalty never comes alone. Yes, it is always associated with a mistake that you won’t take on a serious note. There are serval SEO practices that could lead you to face Google’s punishment in the form of a penalty, and link building is one of them.
Yes, you read it right. While doing the link building, being a marketer, you may sometimes follow some methods or ways that Google finds wrong.
So, no matter how large or well-established your business is, if your link-building practices break Google’s set rules, then there is a high chance that you can wind up with penalties that won’t only affect the search ranking but also the days of efforts you have made to achieve your SEO goals.
Playing nice with Google can help you save your website from penalties and losing your search traffic. After all, no one would want to put money in a competitor’s pocket.
While carrying out the link-building process, it is good to consider a few points to avoid Google penalties in 2021. After all, it’s a new year, and you shouldn’t repeat the same 2020 mistake in the next one. Right?
Before discussing the ideal link-building practice to avoid Google penalties, let us understand what link building is and why it is so important.
What Link Building Is
Link Building is a popular SEO practice of creating one-way hyperlinks (also called backlinks) to a website. The main motive behind carrying out this practice is to improve search visibility.
Several link building strategies such as content marketing, building useful tools, email outreach, broken link building, public relations, etc., are followed to improve the SEO performance of your website on Google and other search engines.
Importance of Link Building
To know the importance of link building, you need to go back to pre-Google days, when search engines like Alta Vista, Yahoo used to deliver search results based on the content of a webpage.
With the introduction of Google, the story took a new twist. Google comes up with a PageRank Algorithm that works at how many people are linked to that page. This newly-introduced strategy of Google works great even after so many years to its introduction.
This backlinking strategy is still considered the best way of determining the quality of a webpage. Google now focuses on link-quality and, at the same time, penalized the website that doesn’t meet their search engine guidelines.
Link Building Practices to Avoid Google Penalties in 2021
1. Low-Quality Link Penalty
The low-quality link is the first practice that increases the chances of getting penalized by Google. When it comes to organic link building, it is highly essential to follow ethical link building practices.
Play a fair game with Google to gain better results. Earning your links in the right or organic manner can help you score well in search results. But in the boast of gaining quick results, they count in links from all sources without prioritizing the quality and niche of the site.
Such a practice of getting links from low websites in an unnatural way, Google can penalize you. So, if you want to face the penalty, then it is recommended to earn your backlinks from reputable sites that will increase the brand value and also help you gain more traffic.
2. Never Buy Links
Buying links is another way of gaining the attention of Google to penalize your website. The search engine giant, Google never shows any mercy to your mistakes.
Sometimes, you may get attracted by those companies, selling links at the lowest price and guaranteeing that they are undetectable, but we advise you never to trust them.
Buying links is done to manipulate the Page Rank, but at the same time, it can affect your website performance on being caught by Google. Yes, you can get penalized by this giant search engine.
3. Guest Blogging
With the name, one can determine its meaning. Guest blogging is one of the most popular link-building practices where someone writes & publishes a blog post on a third-party website or blogging website to promote their brand and earning links.
There are a few things that you need to avoid during guest posting so that you won’t get penalized by Google.
Say No To Unnatural Links
Google’s algorithm constantly updates to offer the best user experience and reduce webspam online. In order to minimize the score of webspam, Google penalizes several websites for unnatural links that go to the website that is irrelevant to what the article is all about.
So, before you go for guest blog submission, keep the below-listed factor in mind-
- Include links that add value to the article or blog.
- Check if the links provided with the content by the guest author are natural or not.
- If you find any link not helpful, then it is better to remove it using the rel=no follow tag. It is a quite better move than getting penalized by Google.
100% Unique Content
Before you submit all the articles for guest posting, you should check if the content you are submitting is unique or not.
Google prioritizes providing the best web user experience and no surprise that this search engine giant will not prefer duplicate content. In other words, duplicate content can trouble you and, at the same time, increase the chances of getting penalties from Google.
Therefore, we highly recommend you to use 100% unique and quality content while guest posting. You can use several tools to detect plagiarism.
4. Getting Nofollow Links
No-follow links are not so useful for the SEO performance of websites on Google. But if you want to rank on top of search engines like Bing, then you can build no-follow links.
But in case, if you are focusing on Google, then building no-follow links will be a waste of time.
Put more effort into getting do-follow (quality) incoming links as Google ignores the no-follow link. But if you still work on the same no-follow links that Google doesn’t prioritize, then get ready to be penalized by this search engine.
5. Excessive link building in a short span
Doing anything excessive on Google can lead you to the penalty zone. So, we suggest you never build a lot of links at a time as this way; you can immediately catch the attention of search engines and raise the chances of getting penalized or blocked.
It’s a common mistake that most SEO marketers or website owners follow to rank high in a short span of time. Excessive link building can also remove your site from indexing.
Conclusion
Link building is a common SEO practice carried out by several SEO marketers of the website owners to rank high on Google. But this boast of getting immediate results sometimes leads you to Google penalty. In this post, we have covered some crucial link-building practices that are prone to Google penalties. We hope you find it all helpful.
Author Bio
Ravi Sharma, CEO of Webomaze – # 1 SEO Company in Chandigarh is a highly enthusiastic entrepreneur. He has got a great grip on the idea of effective eCommerce Strategies, SEO processes, and tactics which are vital for virtual exposure. He is a fun-loving person and a keen traveler who always hunts to find adventure in new places.
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