Five mistakes teams make with backlinks

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit backlinks.

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

The mistakes we see most

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones
• Bought links are a risk that eventually gets priced in
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Being genuinely useful is still the most durable link strategy. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Making it stick

What this looks like day to day

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about backlinks before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• A handful of relevant links beats hundreds of irrelevant ones — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.