Weird Crazy Myths About Link Building in SEO You Should Probably Ignore - Whiteboard Friday9/9/2016 Posted by randfish The rules of link building aren't always black and white, and getting it wrong can sometimes result in frustrating consequences. But where's the benefit in following rules that don't actually exist? In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand addresses eight of the big link building myths making their rounds across the web. Video TranscriptionHowdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week we're going to chat about some of the weird and crazy myths that have popped up around link building. We've actually been seeing them in the comments of some of our blog posts and Whiteboard Fridays and Q&A. So I figured, hey, let's try and set the record straight here. 1. Never get links from sites with a lower domain authority than your ownWhat? No, that is a terrible idea. Domain authority, just to be totally clear, it's a machine learning system that we built here at Moz. It takes and looks at all the metrics. It builds the best correlation it can against Google's rankings across a broad set of keywords, similar to the MozCast 10K. Then it's trying to represent, all other things being equal and just based on raw link authority, how well would this site perform against other sites in Google's rankings for a random keyword? That does not in any way suggest whether it is a quality website that gives good editorial links, that Google is likely to count, that are going to give you great ranking ability, that are going to send good traffic to you. None of those things are taken into account with domain authority. 2. Never get links from any directoriesI know where this one comes from. We have talked a bunch about how low-quality directories, SEO-focused directories, paid link directories tend to be very bad places to get links from. Google has penalized not just a lot of those directories, but many of the sites whose link profiles come heavily from those types of domains. 3. Don't get links too fast or you'll get penalizedLet's try and think about this. Like Google has some sort of penalty line where they look at, "Oh, well, look at that. We see in August, Rand got 17 links. He was under at 15 in July, but then he got 17 links in August. That is too fast. We're going to penalize him." Yes. If you are doing sketchy, grey hat/black hat link building with your private networks, your link buys, and your swapping schemes, and all these kinds of things, yeah, it's probably the case that if you get them too fast, you'll trip over some sort of filter that Google has got. But if you're doing the kind of link building that we generally recommend here on Whiteboard Friday and at Moz more broadly, you don't have risk here. I would not stress about this at all. So long as your links are coming from good places, don't worry about the pace of them. There's no such thing as too fast. 4. Don't link out to other sites, or you'll leak link equity, or link juice, or PageRank...or whatever it is. I really like this illustration of the guys who are like, "My link juice. No!" This is just crap. 5. Variations in anchor text should be kept to precise proportionsSo this idea that essentially there's some magic formula for how many of your keyword anchor text, anchor phrases should be branded, partially branded, keyword match links that are carrying anchor text that's specifically for the keywords you're trying to rank for, and random assorted anchor texts and that you need some numbers like these, also a crazy idea. So yes, if you are in the grey/black hat world of link acquisition, sure, maybe you should pay some attention to how the anchor text looks. But again, if you're following the advice that you get here on Whiteboard Friday and at Moz, this is not a concern. 6. Never ask for a link directly or you risk penaltiesThis one I understand, because there have been a bunch of cases where folks or organizations have sent out emails, for example, to their customers saying, "Hey, if you link to us from your website, we'll give you a discount," or, "Hey, we'd like you to link to this resource, and in exchange this thing will happen," something or other. I get that those penalties and that press around those types of activities has made certain people sketched out. I also get that a lot of folks use it as kind of blackmail against someone. That sucks. 7. More than one link from the same website is uselessThis one is rooted in the idea that, essentially, diversity of linking domains is an important metric. It tends to be the case that sites that have more unique domains linking to them tend to outrank their peers who have only a few sites linking to them, even if lots of pages on those individual sites are providing those links. 8. Links from non-relevant sites or sites or pages or content that's outside your niche won't help you rank betterThis one, I think, is rooted in that idea that Google is essentially looking and saying like, "Hey, we want to see that there's relevance and a real reason for Site A to link to Site B." But if a link is editorial, if it's coming from a high-quality place, if there's a reason for it to exist beyond just, "Hey, this looks like some sort of sketchy SEO ploy to boost rankings," Googlebot is probably going to count that link and count it well. Video transcription by Speechpad.com Feeling inspired by reality? Start building quality links with OSE. 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