3 Link Building Methods that are Obsolete in 2021

As a search engine optimizer, you need to always keep an eye out for what's new to know which methods are working and which aren't working anymore. In this article, we will talk about 3 methods of link building that are obsolete now. Let's get started.

 

1. Optimization of anchor texts

The first and most important one we will talk about is anchor text optimization. Previously, if you wanted to rank for a certain keyword, you could go ahead and get a bunch of backlinks with the same keyword as anchor text and that would work just fine. The world has changed and now Google doesn't like to see anchor texts for more than a certain percentage of its overall backlink profile. Although no one knows the actual rate that Google wants, it is thought that your anchor text for any keyword should not be more than 10%.

 

Tools like Majestic have made it easier to see and analyze their anchor text profiles and if you're working on a website, your task should be to make sure that the anchor text ratio for any given keyword doesn't go above 10%.

 

Optimizing your anchor text is not that difficult. Let's use an example to make it even clearer. Let's say you want to rank for the keyword "cat food." Instead of creating 20 anchor text links with the same keyword called "cat food," you can do it on keywords that have to do with cat food, such as cat food tips, cat food guide, handling of cat food, etc. This will give you a nice variation of anchor text and at the same time tell Google that the web page is about cat food.

 

Currently, to succeed in link building you need to have a diversified anchor profile, including all the types of anchors in it. And in general, any effective link building consists of a diversified anchor profile.

 

2. SEO scholarships

SEO scholarships has been a method that was discussed in 2015 and 2016. The idea was to create a scholarship page on your website and then offer something to students. So simply, the goal was to email that page to universities and colleges asking them to include it in their scholarship section. This was logical and worked well for the first year.

 

As more SEOs started doing this, universities became cautious about strategy and soon realized that no one was actually offering scholarships to students and it was all done just for backlinks. Since then, the strategy has started to go down and the success rate with this strategy was less than 1% in 2017.

 

Google has never said anything against this strategy and technically, you can still link and rank a website using this method. It is the colleges and universities that are now more strict about this method and therefore it can be considered dead.

 

3. Comments on other blogs

Comments on other blogs (which included a link from your website) to get backlinks are methods that worked before and certainly no longer.

 

They don't work as much as they used to, simply because webmasters now know what the true intention behind each comment is. Popular CMS systems like WordPress now make it very easy for someone to mark a comment as SPAM which was not the case before. Previously, you had to go through each comment manually to understand if it is spam or a legitimate comment, but the scenario has completely changed, since comments that are made just to get a link can be easily and automatically identified.

 

Also, a high percentage of those comments are now considered as nofollow links, Google will not give that link a higher ranking even if they are approved, which is now an outdated link building method.