How To Avoid Link Pat­terns And Penalties

When we’re look­ing at SEO and what we need to do in or­der to achieve as high a place in Google’s rank­ings for our key­words as pos­si­ble, it is easy to for­get that Google is a busi­ness with con­sumers to satisfy.

At the end of the day, any changes Google makes to al­go­rithms, or man­ual penal­ties they in­flict on web­sites, are done be­cause they want to keep peo­ple com­ing back to their site, and not us­ing Bing, Ya­hoo!, Duck­DuckGo, or any other search engine.

If you’re build­ing too many ar­ti­fi­cial links with­out giv­ing due thought to the whole process, you’re go­ing to leave a trail. Once Google spot it, you’re likely to be pe­nal­ized. Here is how you can max­imise the suc­cess of your SEO ac­tiv­i­ties by avoid­ing dam­ag­ing link patterns.

Use Va­ri­ety

The most com­mon prob­lem Google finds is that all links look the same. This hap­pens when a busi­ness uses one way, such as guest post­ing, to build links, with­out con­sid­er­ing any other methods.

Let us be clear that there is noth­ing wrong with guest post­ing, it is an es­sen­tial as­pect of any SEO cam­paign. Only guest post­ing to build links, how­ever, is as un­nat­ural as it gets.

Di­ver­sity and va­ri­ety is where you need to be go­ing with your link build­ing. From guest post­ing and us­ing so­cial me­dia to gain­ing ci­ta­tions and earn­ing links from your own high qual­ity on site con­tent, you need to have your fin­ger in many pies to have a great link portfolio.

Write for User Experience

It might sound stu­pid, but for­get­ting about SEO is usu­ally the best way to ap­proach SEO. If you’re writ­ing con­tent for your own site, think about the new ideas it in­tro­duces and whether peo­ple are go­ing to want to link to it.

If you can earn 10 nat­ural links be­cause your con­tent is that good, plus an­other 10 so­cial me­dia shares, you’ve in­stantly su­per­charged your SEO purely by look­ing at the user ex­pe­ri­ence el­e­ments of what you do.

Take the same ap­proach if you’re guest post­ing. Write a high qual­ity piece of con­tent that will drive traf­fic; don’t just write any­thing for the sake of get­ting a link.

Fo­cus on Yourself

We’ve just men­tioned the im­por­tance of qual­ity con­tent, but it re­ally needs its own sec­tion to do it jus­tice. When peo­ple talk about pro­duc­ing con­tent that peo­ple will want to link to, they get stuck think­ing that it only re­lates to writ­ten content.

How­ever, in­fo­graph­ics and video tu­to­ri­als are among the lead­ing types of con­tent that are linked to.

Like with link build­ing, if you have a di­verse cat­a­logue of con­tent, more peo­ple will link to you, mean­ing every as­pect of your link port­fo­lio will be nat­ural and strong.

Know How to Use An­chor Text

Links that come from ex­act match an­chor text aren’t go­ing to achieve any­thing. In­stead of get­ting key­word heavy with your an­chor text, even when link­ing in­ter­nally, sim­ply point the reader in the di­rec­tion of your site with a brand name or URL.

Fol­low­ing these tips will help you avoid cre­at­ing link pat­terns and sub­se­quent Google penal­ties; make sure you have them in mind in all of your SEO ac­tiv­i­ties go­ing forward.