Let me share a surprising fact: “Google hates link building.” Why? Because people use spammy practices to get links. And when it comes to Google, you can only survive by following Google’s guidelines. In the past, search engine marketers tried to scam Google with black hat strategies.
Source: Pixabay
The search engine giants want to disperse quality information to internet users. As a result, spammy paid links, blog networks, and blog comments will not work. Black hat SEO practices may result in penalties by Google.
There is a common misconception that penalties happen when Google changes its algorithm. Your website may face these penalties even without an algorithm update. Do you know the reason? Spammy links, stuffing keywords, or poor-quality content are some common culprits.
In this article, we will share some white hat backlink strategies for affordable link building without getting penalized by Google.
Unnatural Links that Can Trigger Google Penalties
Unnatural and bad links can hurt the reputation of your site. Here are some common link building tactics that can trigger a Google penalty. Let’s discuss the ways to avoid them:
Be Careful While Getting Press Release Links
Almost ten years ago, press releases were affordable link building techniques. It was easy to write a press release, publish it to many press release distribution sites, and get hundreds of backlinks. People started abusing it and making it a link scheme.
So you should avoid press release links on over-optimized anchor text pointing to your primary keyword. If you want a website link, do keyword research to use branded URLs or naked URLs as your anchor text. Use one link at a time from the press release’s contact area.
You can use the following mix of anchor texts:
Branded: Link Gathering
Domain: linkgathering.com
Webmaster name
According to Moz, 17% of your anchor text must be branded terms. It will help you increase the search rankings of your branded keywords and increase your brand’s exposure leading to organic traffic. Again, don’t overdo anything because Google can quickly smell something fishy.
Be Careful with Guest Posting
Guest posting is an affordable link building tactic to strengthen your site’s SEO (search engine optimization). Despite its several benefits, you should do it cautiously, like selecting relevant targets for guest posts and using natural, meaningful anchor texts.
You appear as a guest on someone else’s website, so don’t make yourself a ghost by using unnatural links. When building your link profile, don’t try to get too many backlinks in a short period. For Google, rapid link building is unnatural, and your site may earn a penalty.
Google penalized SEO Doc Sheldon’s website for a single guest post because he used an anchor text, “Hispanic data,” to get a backlink. To avoid this situation, choose natural, correct phrases to link to your website. If your anchor text is disconnected or vague, the search engines have a reason to penalize you.
Nofollow links in a guest post can save you from Google. Use it in the content and author’s signature. Be careful while considering guest post services. Avoid any direct promotion of your product or service in guest posts.
A Big No to Private Blog Networks
A private blog network (PBN) is another toxic practice that can harm your search engine rankings. It is a website network that links to other sites to improve their rankings. The feeder sites transfer link equity to the primary website to boost ranking and authority.
Source: Pexels
PBNs contain standard templates and free blog services. However, content varied in each blog, but anchor texts contain exact match keywords with limited variations. It seems like the same juice in a different bottle. To avoid a Google penalty, remove or disown these links using the disavow tool.
Google will ultimately detect inbound links in the PBN domain, so you can’t expect good performance in search results. Here are some signs to detect a spammy PBN:
- Site is new
- The owner has recently changed the site
- Poor traffic performance
- Low authority score
- Doman lacks contacts and a privacy policy
If you are using link building services, examine their link building packages carefully. Some may try to sell you PBN links and pass them as white hat backlink strategies. Your website needs the best quality backlinks from real websites.
User-Generated Spam Links
No doubt, user-generated content is the most valuable, but you should avoid spammy content. User-generated spam links are common in forum posts or signatures, or profiles. You may find spammy do-follow links in the comment sections. To keep your backlink profile clean, disavow links from user-generated spammy sites.
Google penalized Mozilla due to spammy user-generated content on its site. According to Google, UGC spam is common on guestbook pages, forum pages, or in profiles or users. To protect your entire website from a Google penalty due to UGC, use the “nofollow” tag. This tag will signal search engines that you don’t endorse links in UGC. You can avoid the penalty by using the rel=“ugc” attribute.
Don’t Try to Manipulate Google with Unnatural Links
Unnatural links refer to artificial links that webmasters may use to manipulate a site’s ranking. This practice may include paid links or links created by spammers and scrapers. Some link builders prefer buying links for money or other favors from relevant sites. You can’t avoid Google bots or the review team, no matter how smart you are.
To avoid penalties, you should follow Google’s webmaster guidelines. If you are penalized for deceptive, manipulative, or unnatural outbound links, fix them. Google search console may be helpful in link audits and add a rel=“nofollow”.
Top White Hat Backlink Strategies
Source: Pixabay
White hat backlink strategies are ethical ways to optimize your website. By following search engine guidelines, you can avoid penalties. Though, it takes longer to get backlinks with white hat link building from real websites. You can use the following ethical and affordable link building tactics to get high quality backlinks:
Get valuable and Contextual Links with Statistics
It is one of the best white hat backlink strategies to get quality links. You can back up your content with statistics when writing new articles and blog posts. In this way, you can add validity to your claims.
No doubt, readers find it trustworthy if your content has factual data. So it is always a tremendous white hat link building strategy to get more links. Write a blog post with survey data and statistics for the best results.
Survey data will help you earn high quality links and can be used to grow brand awareness. It will help you increase visitors and referral traffic to your website.
Get Advantage of Broken Links for Content Promotion
Broken link building involves finding web pages with broken or dead links. These pages often show a 404 error page because the content is deleted, moved, or reorganized over time. Replacing broken links with your website link is an important SEO strategy.
SEMRush and Ahrefs are essential tools to find web pages with broken links. In this strategy, you offer help along with asking for something. After finding a bad link to a web page, you can send an outreach email with an offer to replace this link with links from quality websites. It is absolutely a white hat link building strategy.
Create Infographics to Attract White Hat Links
The use of infographics is an integral part of white hat backlink strategies. Infographics refer to data visualization with images, charts, and graphics to showcase statistics in an appealing way. You can use them to give a brief overview of every topic.
Use infographics to explain complex topics. These are good for affordable link building.
Get Killer Backlinks with HARO
HARO (help a reporter out) is a platform for journalists’ requests. You can sign up to HARO to receive daily emails about business, lifestyle, and marketing topics. It is a white hat link building source from journalist blogs and news websites.
These websites have high domain authority and rankings with an impressive readership. Sign up for HARO and receive three emails daily with requests for tips, stories, quotes, and recommendations from different publishers. So it will be easy to select relevant queries for your business.
If they select your submission, you can get a backlink from high-authority websites like The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Fox News, etc. It is an affordable link building method.
Negative SEO Attack May Harm Your Site
Your competitors may try to hurt your SEO efforts. And negative SEO can increase the chances of penalty by Google. So, avoid links from spammy websites. If your site has spam links, Google will perceive it as low-quality. This will affect the rank of your website with the search engines and increase the risk of penalty.
For SEO benefits, find spammy websites linking to your site and disavow every bad backlink. You can create a text file containing spammy incoming links and upload this file using the disavow links tool page. Offer valuable, unique, and rich content. Google will not rank your website if it has the following content:
- Thin affiliate web pages.
- Automatically generated poor content.
- Low-quality blog posts and scraped content.
- Doorway pages.
- Duplicate content.
You can’t escape Google’s penalty if your website has poor content. To increase the authority and rankings of your website, offer unique content and use white hat SEO. With technical SEO, you can audit the overall link profile of your website.
Cold Outreach for Building Links
You can’t miss outreach link building from the white hat backlink strategies list. Yet it isn’t easy to get responses to your emails. Affordable link building is competitive because everyone wants to improve their backlink profile and website ranking.
For quality backlinks from big brands in your industry, you should send a ton of emails. To get a response, promise to deliver valuable and fantastic content to your target site. You will not earn backlinks if your outreach delivers poor and vague content.
If you want your site ranks higher, try to earn maximum backlinks. You can send over 400 emails per month to relevant websites in your niche.
Conclusion
White hat backlink strategies can help you earn backlinks from high-authority websites. These strategies require more time and research to avoid unnatural backlinks. It is not easy to work in the link building industry due to shady scams. Many SEO agencies promise instant rankings and cheap or affordable link building.
So you should work with reliable backlinking service providers. Make sure to earn inbound links through long-form content and direct outreach. For affordable link building, earn links from websites with good authority and ranking.
Remember, white hat link building strategies include different methods, such as cold outreach, guest content creation, unique data, etc. Avoid shortcuts because you can get temporary benefits with unethical backlink building. Always invest your time and money in white hat backlink strategies for long-term benefits.
