It is evident that you should never follow black hat SEO techniques to avoid getting penalized by Google. However, even the SEO experts and pros today are unaware of some common link building mistakes in 2025 that actually harm their search engine optimization efforts.
Mistakes in building backlinks can not only lower your rankings significantly but also may get you banned from Google indexing altogether. This is why we have curated a list of common backlink mistakes to avoid, with insights and tips from veterans in the field of digital marketing and SEO training.
Why does Google hate link-building mistakes?
The aim of Google is to serve the best content and search results to the users and enable a seamless user experience. That is the reason it keeps on updating its algorithms and recommending things like mobile SEO.
If it doesn’t offer the best UX, it will lose its popularity. So, your focus with the website must be to serve the users rather than search engines. If users like your content, Google will love it.
If you don’t keep yourself updated with the latest Webmaster Guidelines, you will keep on making common link building mistakes. If you are not following the rules of Google SEO, you will lose the game.
The primary reason Google hates certain backlink strategies is that SEO guys are manipulating things for their own benefits. You can’t over smart Google. If you do so, the next Google algorithm update will punish your website rankings.
Common Link-Building Mistakes to Avoid in SEO
Let’s discuss the top backlink mistakes in off-page SEO that are done by a majority of SEO people today. Whether you are using white hat or black hat link building techniques, there will be some impact on your rankings- for better or worse.
- Focusing only on high DA backlinks
- Getting obsessed with competitors backlinks
- Press Release Link Building
- Blog Comments
- Buying backlinks
- Creating too many backlinks in short period
- Overloading the anchor text
- Backlinks from websites with bad reputation
- Backlinks from irrelevant content
- Low-quality guest posts
- Generating backlinks automatically
- Using Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
- Building links from copied or poor content
- Focusing on quantity over quality
- Not diversifying links
- Building only do-follow links
- Ignoring local SEO link building
- Neglecting internal linking
- Not tracking or monitoring links
- Linking to irrelevant contexts
1. Focusing only on high DA backlinks
While this is not the case with all webmasters because building backlinks from high domain authority (DA) websites is a difficult task to do.
But if you are creating backlinks for SEO only from high DA blogs and websites, then you need to revamp your link-building strategies.
Think of your website as an organic source where you have to plant seeds in the form of backlinks. Of course, you will plant lots of seeds for more trees and eventually more benefits. But you have to remember that not all the seeds will have a long life.
The same goes for the backlinks. Not all the links will last for a lifetime. Some of them will become highly authoritative, and some might shrink. So, what this means for you is that you should not solely rely on creating high DA backlinks. The low DA backlinks you ignore today might grow tomorrow and bring you great benefits.
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2. Getting obsessed with competitors backlinks
While this is a great idea to spy on and find the websites from which your competitors have created or earned backlinks, but don’t become too obsessed with it.
It is among the top SEO backlink myths that if you build backlinks the same as your competitor, you will be able to outrank them. Remember, search engine optimization is not only about backlink creation.
What you should do is to find your competitor’s backlinks, and analyze what’s working for them and what is their SEO link building strategy. This will also give you an idea about the SEO trends in your industry. Based on this analysis, build your own unique white-label backlink building plan and execute it.
3. Press Release Link Building
Creating backlinks from press releases is a widely used link building technique. The reason behind it is that you can easily get numerous backlinks to your website by writing one piece of content that gets published across multiple PR sites. In some cases, there are hundreds of backlinks created with this link building technique.
However, getting backlinks from press releases has become an outdated method now. It is because SEO pros started using it as a tactic to generate backlinks and abuse Google’s intent of serving the best content to users.
As a result, Google now considers press release link building as a link scheme. Generally, webmasters optimize the anchor text in the PR content with their desired keywords. This used to help in boosting the ranking for those keywords, but it’s no longer considered a part of organic SEO. Your ranking may suffer because of such backlinks.
How to avoid this?
Instead of using the links on keywords, you should go for branded URLs or naked URLs. A branded URL is a link that is related to your brand name. So, you should hyperlink your business name instead of keywords. Naked URLs are those that are not used on any text. They are used as it is.
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4. Blog Comments
Are blog comments good for your SEO?
Yes. And a big no.
Google used to count the links in the comments section of blogs as backlinks. However, this is currently the most-abused technique in SEO services. People are generating blog comments using automated bots. These are called spam comments.
In fact, if you have a WordPress website, you might have noticed hundreds of comments done on your blog posts for the sole purpose of backlinks. Akismet, a popular WordPress plugin that helps in preventing spammy comments, reported that it filters more than 7.5 million spam comments every hour.
According to Shelly Fagin, an SEO consultant at Search Engine Journal, the blog commenting SEO tactic used to work. However, it doesn’t work and hasn’t worked for a long time now.
So, if you are still putting in your efforts into blog commenting, then it’s high time for you to avoid this link building mistake.
Are blog comments completely useless?
No. You can blog commenting strategically to build relationships with other bloggers, gain exposure, and eventually drive some traffic to your website. If your sole purpose is to increase the number of backlinks, then forget this.
5. Buying backlinks
Should you buy backlinks for SEO?
Every SEO person will say no to it. However, this is a tactic that many of them use but never admit. There are many agencies today that offer backlinks service in bulk at a cost-effective price.
For example, this agency is selling 10,000+ backlinks for just $75. Could you believe it? You just have to pay and they will generate thousands of mixed backlinks from high DA, .gov, and .edu websites.
Now, see what Google has to say about buying or selling backlinks:
The search engine giant is very clear about things. If you buy backlinks in exchange for money, links, or services, it will harm your rankings on the search engine results page (SERP). This is by far the biggest link building mistakes to avoid in 2025.
If you want organic rankings for your website with organic link building techniques, then you must rely on SEO services offered by a reliable digital marketing company.
In case you want to learn how to build backlinks and other SEO techniques, you can enrol yourself in an online SEO course.
6. Creating too many backlinks in short period
Undoubtedly, earning or creating quality backlinks boosts your search engine rankings. But one thing you need to take care of is to avoid building too many backlinks to your website within a short period of time. There is a term in SEO called link velocity, which represents the rate of link building for your site.
If your link velocity is high, you are at risk of getting penalized by Google in terms of search engine rankings. While Google says that backlink creation should be natural, SEO guys know that they have to put in effort to build backlinks.
However, don’t make things too obvious for Google. For example, your website has only 20 backlinks for the last 2 years, and this number becomes 250 within the next month. Wouldn’t that sound too fishy?
This is yet another big SEO mistake that you must avoid while building white hat backlinks. You can also hire SEO analyst or expert for your website who can create a proper backlink and SEO strategy. This will help you avoid link building mistakes and rank on the first page of Google organically.
7. Overloading the anchor text
Anchor text is the text or words that are hyperlinked to another webpage.
For example, the ‘digital marketing course’ in the below example is an anchor text.
“Digital marketing course helps you build several skills related to SEO, social media, online advertising, and more.”
While creating backlinks, the strategy of most of the SEO executives is to get a backlink on the primary keyword of the website or a web page. This improves the website ranking for that keyword.
While this strategy works, but if you overload the anchor text or keyword with the same link, Google will count it spamming.
Since the release of the Penguin update in 2016, Google also checks whether a website is over-optimized using backlinks and anchor texts. Google doesn’t penalize your entire website though, but the ranking of the page you are getting the backlink to will be affected.
The role of an anchor text is to tell users and search engines about the intent of the hyperlink and what to expect from the destination page. However, if you are creating numerous backlinks to your website with the same keywords, this will alarm the search engines that you are trying to manipulate things for higher rankings.
Hence, you have to ensure that you avoid this SEO mistake. While backlink building, try to use the link on a mix of long-tail keywords, phrase match keywords, etc.
8. Backlinks from websites with bad reputation
Google doesn’t like certain websites, like spam sites, casino and gambling sites, porn sites, illegal and duplicate content blogs, etc.
If you are getting backlinks from any of such websites, then you need to get rid of them. Google will lower your rankings. Your aim should be to earn backlinks from reputed and authoritative websites.
On the other hand, if you run a blog where you provide backlinks to bad websites, it will also impact your rankings for worse.
9. Backlinks from irrelevant content
At WsCube Tech, a digital marketing and web development company, if we build backlinks from websites dedicated to travel, games, finance, and casino, Google wouldn’t miss noticing this. Why will a travel or game website link to a digital marketing agency?
A couple of backlinks created naturally might not get Google’s attention. However, if you are just increasing the number of backlinks without seeing whether it is coming from relevant niches or not, then your chances of getting penalized will just increase.
10. Low-quality guest posts
This is one of the biggest and top link building mistakes to avoid if you want to leverage white hat SEO. If you are someone who thinks that it is a matter of generating backlinks, regardless of the quality of content, then it is a myth.
There are many webmasters and SEO people who write an article for a guest post, and then create multiple duplicate copies of the same. Their aim is to submit the content on various websites or blogs and build backlinks.
Another such practise is paying peanuts to cheap content writers for new posts. Of course, you will get some new content with corners cut from duplicate content. But this is nothing more than a fly removed from stale food.
Google is very smart. It has the potential to determine quality content that can offer value to readers. If a piece of content is not valuable to users, Google doesn’t like it. Creating backlinks with low-quality articles and duplicate content should be avoided.
If a guest post ranks higher, your backlink will also be more valuable. You can’t achieve that with poor content.
11. Generating backlinks automatically
There are numerous free and paid backlink generators or automated link building tools available on the internet that ask you to enter your website URL and it will generate multiple backlinks for you in a matter of minutes.
This is really too good to be true!
What these tools do is throw your website URL at hundreds of others sites using bots. With this link building technique, you are just inviting spam to your website and increasing your spam score. This declines your organic rankings and harms your SEO efforts.
12. Using Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
Private Blog Networks (PBNs) are a group of websites created with the sole purpose of building links to each other to manipulate search engine rankings. These sites, all with the same owner, stem from one central website trying to boost the authority of a website looking for paid links.
Building links from such websites is the biggest mistake you can make. They may seem legitimate with high domain authority, but the method is considered block-hat SEO, which may land you penalties. They promise great results but can do more harm than good. Finding if the site is a part of PBNs or not can be tricky but here are a few tips to help you:
- Poor quality articles with stuffed keywords.
- Shared IP addresses of multiple sites linking to yours.
- All sites have the same design.
- No social media buttons on the site.
- Similar-looking content.
So, why are PBNs bad? Here are a few reasons you must know:
- They might boost your search engine rankings, but as Google’s algorithms get smarter, they can lead to long-term losses and high risks.
- Search engines actively find PBNs and penalize sites linked to them. Once your site gets flagged, it can lose its search engine ranking and can even be removed from search results.
- They rely on outdated or poor-quality content that hardly adds value to your site. Hence, they can hurt your site’s credibility.
13. Building links from copied or poor content
You can spare no effort to produce quality content for link building, but if you’ve been linking to unscrupulous agencies that have plagiarized or poor-quality content, then all your efforts are in vain. It can damage your brand’s reputation and can even get you penalized. You can find numerous sites and agencies that cut corners to get websites more backlinks, and copied or duplicate content is one such practice.
They accept any type of content for backlinks, which shows they are not professional and ethical. So, avoid this link-building mistake by ensuring that backlinks to your website are built using 100+ original content. Search engines value originality and quality over anything else, and any ignorance of quality can harm your search engine ranking and credibility. You can avoid linking from such content by using the following tips:
- Never link to sites with overloaded ads or links as they indicate low-quality practices.
- Visit the site and review its content meticulously to stay away from websites with poorly-written, untrustworthy, or irrelevant content.
- Build links from well-maintained sites with relevant topics and original content.
14. Focusing on quantity over quality
Gone are the days when having a large amount of backlinks would be enough to rank well on search engines. Now, with more sophisticated and advanced search engines and algorithms, it is easy to find spammy and low-quality links meant to manipulate search engine rankings. This can drop ranking instead of improving it. So, what should be the priority while building links? The answer is- the combination of relevance, quality, and authority.
The target website page and the linked page of your site must be relevant to each other. Also, the backlinks must be from sites with high-quality content. Lastly, the target site must have strong metrics, such as a low spam score and high domain authority.
Even if you have a small number of backlinks from high-authority sites, it will yield better SEO results than having many backlinks from inferior sites. Reach out to quality and relevant sites that cover topics related to your sector. Connect with influencers interested in trying your products and share about them on their social media accounts.
15. Not diversifying links
When it comes to SEO and link building, never put all your eggs in one basket. Building quality backlinks is a challenging process that demands varied techniques and constant efforts. You can’t rely on one or two methods to build backlinks, as it can hamper your brand’s growth. Add variety to it as it is the most crucial factor in the link-building domain.
Try varied tactics, such as social media, guest posting, broken link building, and influencer outreach. This will promote a regular inflow of high-quality backlinks while ensuring you are not relying on one method to make things work. Step out of your comfort zone and explore this exciting world to leverage the best sources and strategies.
Incorporate the following proven link-building strategies into your approach:
- Brand mentions where influencers or trusted pages mention your brand, which can be quickly turned into backlinks.
- Helpful guest posts in exchange for backlinks.
- Niche edits, where you add links to existing content rather than creating new articles. Find well-performing pages and place your links on them to boost your SEO efforts.
- Get listed in local business directories to strengthen your backlink profile.
- Find broken links and suggest your content as a replacement. It will serve two purposes- the owner can fix broken links, and you can earn a valuable link.
- Share visually appealing infographics with your site’s link.
16. Building only do-follow links
It is a common assumption that only do-follow links are the key to boosting search engine rankings and credibility. However, this is a myth and a link-building mistake you must avoid. Yes, do-follow links add value to SEO efforts and improve rankings, but ignoring no-follow links completely can create an unnatural backlink profile and harm your credibility in the long run. Here are a few more reasons why you can’t focus only on do-follow links:
- Search engine algorithms seek balance to assess authenticity. When you have a diverse link profile with both types of links, it shows that you earned these links naturally based on your credibility, which enhances your link-building campaigns.
- When you have only do-follow links, it can seem manipulative or spammy. On the other hand, the right mix of do-follow and no-follow links creates a healthy backlink profile.
- No-follow links from comments, social media, and forums can drive valuable traffic to your website.
17. Ignoring local SEO link-building
If you are a local business, start focusing on neighborhood connections. Prioritize geo-targeted and local SEO link-building strategies to target and reach local audiences. For local businesses, getting links from websites outside the area of their services may not provide much benefit. This is because Google is becoming more advanced and proficient in understanding the relevance and context of the links. So, when you build links from local business listing sites, directories, and blogs, you can improve your website’s rankings and visibility in local search results, which connects you better with the target audience.
Establish connections that matter and cater to the same areas as your business. You will see a significant increase in the local online visibility. Moreover, this will enable you to align your online presence with the demand and interests of your target customers.
18. Neglecting internal linking
When we talk about link building, most SEO professionals think of guest blogging, social media, and other external websites that can help them improve their website’s visibility and authority. However, there is one crucial factor that you might be ignoring- internal link building. It is an essential strategy to execute to boost SEO.
You have to make a thorough and thoughtful strategy for internal linking so your links are distributed evenly across your website. It also enhances the crawling efficiency of search engines and improves user navigation and experience. So, why do internal links matter?
- Clustering interlinks around a hub allows bots to easily discover and understand your website’s hierarchy and structure so they can index your content without hassle.
- Internal links distribute authority from high-ranking pages to other web pages, so your site performs well on search engine results.
- These links connect pages of your website, making it easier for search engines to crawl it and for users to find relevant content.
- Guides visitors to related pages and keeps them on the site longer.
Now that you know the importance of internal links. Let’s see how to build internal links:
- Add links in a way that genuinely helps users.
- It must be relevant to the content.
- Link related pages.
- Prefer simple anchor texts for linked pages to avoid over-optimization.
19. Not tracking or monitoring links
If you are not tracking your links, you are flying blind. You must hold on to your links to understand if they are helping or hurting your website. Over time, some links may break, spammers may attempt to sabotage your site with low-quality links, some may lose relevance, or there might be an unfortunate event.
Below, we have explained why you need to analyze your backlink data:
- Tracking helps you assess if your strategies are working as intended. You can find backlink strategies that worked and ones that didn’t. Refine your approach accordingly to drive better results.
- Some links may break over time due to changes in the website or content removal. Tracking helps you fix these broken links and keep all of them effective.
- Regular monitoring helps you find and remove spammy and low-quality backlinks before they can harm your website ranking.
- It keeps your link-building strategy strong and on track, keeping your website’s SEO healthy and avoiding unnecessary penalties.
Stay ahead of these challenges by regularly monitoring your backlink data and detecting potential issues. You can use tools like Ahrefs, Moz, Google Search Console, etc., to examine your backlinks.
20. Linking to irrelevant contexts
Context matters more than you can imagine. When you place links in irrelevant context, it confuses search engines and doesn’t provide any value to users. For example, if you sell beauty products, you must place your link in a beauty blog supporting your anchor text. Also, placing your link in a tech blog would look unnatural, which can affect your website’s credibility.
Also, placing links in a negative context is the last thing you want while trying to build your online presence. For example, placing a link in a blog that takes a negative stand on your products or portrays them in a bad light. When search engines see multiple websites linking to your page in a negative context, they will not trust your brand, which can damage its reputation and harm your search engine rankings. So, what’s the best way out?
Your link must align with the purpose of your linked page. So, if your page is about skincare or organic beauty products, then place the link in the blog that discusses related topics, like trending beauty tips or skincare routines.
- Build links in a way that genuinely adds value to the readers, such as case studies, detailed guides, and other resources.
- Prefer websites with content and blogs that are closely related to your industry.
- Build links that strengthen your SEO efforts and make your site more authoritative.
FAQs About Link-Building Mistakes
Common link-building mistakes include:
-Focusing only on high DA backlinks
-Buying backlinks
-Backlinks from websites with bad reputation
-Generating backlinks automatically
-Using Private Blog Networks (PBNs)
-Focusing on quantity over quality
-Building only do-follow links
-Neglecting internal linking
-Not tracking or monitoring links
Buying backlinks means violating Google’s guidelines. You have to pay penalties for such spammy links, which can lead to deindexing your website.
You can use tools like Ahrefs, Moz, Google Search Console, and SEMRush to audit your backlink profile and find spammy or irrelevant links.
When you focus on building more and more backlinks within a short span without prioritizing quality, it raises red flags and makes your site look manipulative. It can lead to penalties.
No-follow links help you diversify your backlink profile and make it look natural. They also build brand awareness and drive referral traffic.
When you overload anchor text with keywords, it triggers spam filters and results in over-optimization penalties from search engines.
When you get backlinks from irrelevant sites, it confuses search engines and flutes the quality of your backlink profile. Links appear unnatural, and you can lose the trust of search engines, which affects your rankings.
The right mix of do-follow and no-follow links makes a natural and healthy link profile. You must also diversify your links, add varied anchor texts, and choose relevant sources.
When you post content on low-quality websites, it harms your credibility and search engine rankings. It can hurt your brand’s reputation and hardly adds any value to SEO.
Mistakes are common while building links, but you must address the issue immediately to avoid serious consequences. Audit backlinks regularly, earn high-quality and relevant backlinks, and remove toxic links.
Avoid any black-hat SEO or unethical link-building methods, such as paid links, spammy links, or PBNs. Focus on creating natural links through quality content and place your links on relevant sites.
High-quality content has the power to attract high-authority and natural backlinks, which enhances credibility and provides value to readers. Thus making your link-building strategy impactful and result-driven.
Links from local directories are useful if they are relevant and high-quality. You must avoid spammy or general-purpose directories.
You must monitor your backlinks regularly and audit them quarterly or when you see sudden changes in your website’s traffic or ranking.
Wrapping up:
So, this was your guide to backlink mistakes in off-page SEO. These mistakes are so common that almost every webmaster is making some and killing their search engine optimization strategy. You must rely on creating genuine and natural backlinks, instead of buying backlinks, using free backlink builders, exchanging links, and over-optimizing anchor text.
Also, always focus on quality over quantity. Google is really smart and will catch these mistakes.
Which of these top link building mistakes are you making currently and looking to avoid now? Let us know using the comments below.
Way cool! Some very valid points! I appreciate you penning this article and the rest of the site is very good.
Thank you for the detailed post.
Magnificent website. A lot of useful info here.
Honestly I am very skeptical when it comes to linking out and rarely do that, this post is an eye-opener
In depth as usual
Awesome post !!
Will stay out of these mistakes after this post !!
an extremely informative and powerful post! You always take it to the next level!
Great! Some more actionable tips. I am fan of link building and whenever I see post about it I read them all.
good points
well described. every seo person should avoid these link building mistakes
Thanks,I agree with all the points