Do you plan to invest time and money into SEO in 2018? Want to know the techniques Google hates and could negatively affect your ranking?

We share 9 link building techniques you should stop using in this infographic.

Here are the key points:

• Buying links
• Relying on press releases
• Getting lots of low-quality links
• Using or creating PBN’s
• Over-optimising anchor text
• Getting out-of-context links
• Participating in link exchanges
• Using forums and blog commenting
• Getting too many links at once

Check out the infographic for more detail.

What is link building?

As any marketer, webmaster, or SEO guide will gladly tell you: one reliable formula for SERP success is having relevant, strong, and authoritative backlinks that connect to your website from another.

Backlinks are signals to Google that your website is worthy of attention, can be trusted, and is valuable to the relevant users.

The process of gaining these valuable pots of gold, of course, requires a coherent link-building strategy. Link-building is the process of acquiring high quality backlinks that point to your own website.

The more authoritative, relevant, and valuable links you acquire from websites – the stronger your SERP position will be.

Back-links that matter

Alongside having high quality content, Google themselves have told us that the key to ranking highly on SERPs is by having those reputable backlinks. With its algorithm based largely on links, it’s crucial you adopt link-building as an integral part of your overall strategy of generating traffic.

What are the best link-building tactics out there that will improve your website’s ranking position?

For starters, the authority of the page linking to your website has a massive determining influence over the strength of that backlink. Acquiring links from authoritative pages transfer more authority to your website, letting search engines know that your page can be trusted.

But not only does that website need to be authoritative – it needs to be relevant to the content on your website, too.

If you run a baking blog and receive backlinks from an authoritative mortgage company website – whilst it’s great you’ve received this link, it’s just not relevant to your overall theme.

One of the most effective techniques out there is building link relationships. Whilst this isn’t a process that is achieved overnight, it’s a technique that’s great for building audiences and backlinks with communities that are relevant to your website. And Google loves that more than anything.

Techniques to Avoid

But what about link-building techniques to avoid?

Quite possibly the worst technique you could adopt is purchasing backlinks yourself. Not only is this an unethical approach to take when establishing a strong ranking position, it’s actually ineffective and will land you numerous penalties.

With the introduction of the real-time Penguin algorithm in April 2012, webmasters caught adopting unscrupulous link-building methods will see an immediate drop in rankings.

When SEO experts – and Google – stress the importance of backlinks, it’s easy for beginners to fall intro the trap of seeking backlinks just for the sake of having them. As we discussed earlier, the quality of each backlink matters much more than the quantity.

As harsh as it seems, having loads of low-quality backlinks means – from a search engine’s position – that your website is low-quality, too. If you’re looking to check if a website is worth your attention, use Google Link Count.