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Top 5 Myths About Backlinks
Backlinks are a very common topic among internet marketing forums. If you work in SEO, you have to use backlinks of some sort. For this article, rather than discussing what we know about backlinks, let's discuss some things that many people THINK they know but are actually huge myths about backlinks. It is my hope that you will learn something in this article which can save you hours of work later on down the road. With that, here is my list of the top five myths about backlinks.
1. To start things off, let's discuss one of the most common myths about backlinks. Many people believe that the more backlinks that you have, the better. This is not always true! While 5,000 profiles can be good, I would rather have a backlink from a PR7 homepage than 5,000 profile backlinks. All backlinks are NOT equal. Some backlinks are better than others, and it's always good to go with quality over quantity. For instance, 250 article backlinks can often be more powerful than 5,000 forum profiles because the article backlinks are listed on more relevant pages with your article.
2. A common mistake that I see a lot of people make is that they only build backlinks to their website once and then forget about it. If you are running a big website, you need to create backlinks regularly.
If you just create backlinks once, your website may not last that long in the search engine rankings. Backlinks may get deleted, your competitors may create more backlinks, etc.. You need to create backlinks regularly!
3. Another myth that has recently been in the news is the idea that using the same anchor text for all of your backlinks is okay. Many people learned the hard way recently with a recent update that keeping your anchor text the same for all your backlinks might decrease the power of these backlinks. Search engines will view this as unnatural and may attempt to limit the effect of these backlinks.
4. Since we are on the topic of anchor texts, another myth that many people believe is that you HAVE to have some type of anchor text. This is not always true. You can still receive some benefit from just a URL address without an anchor text. While this may not provide as much of a boost for a specific keyword, it can help you overall with some of your rankings and potentially improve your rankings for multiple keywords. If someone offers you a free PR3 link with just your URL, jump on it! Anchor text doesn't always have to be present for an effect!
5. Finally, I'm going to talk about one of the most debated topics in backlinking. The idea that to many backlinks will penalize you. Many people swear this is true. From my experience though, I'm going to call this a myth. I have NEVER had a website that was banned by Google for to many backlinks. In addition, nowhere in Google's webmaster guidelines do they say that backlinks are a reason for possibly being banned. Here is something to consider. If to many backlinks could penalize your website, what is stopping people from creating thousands of backlinks to their competitor? Corporations spend millions of dollars on SEO work and making sure they rank at the top. Is the answer really just creating a few thousand backlinks and hurting their competitor? Of course not. Google knows this, and they know that if anyone could penalize anyone's site, the search engine index would be in serious trouble. You're NOT going to get penalized for to many backlinks. The worst case scenario is that the search engines figure out that you've created thousands of backlinks, and then choose to lower the value of those backlinks leading you to lose the rankings you once had. It may also lead to a fluctuation in rankings as the search engines try to figure out where your site should be placed. You're not going to get banned though. Anytime I've talked to someone who swears their website was banned for backlinks, I always end up finding something on their website that was breaking the webmaster guidelines.
Well, I hope you enjoyed this article. Hopefully you have learned a bit from this article. If you are struggling to achieve your desired rankings, perhaps this article will help with changing some of your strategies so you can avoid some of the mistakes you may be making. Good luck!
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