Global Link Building Blunders

There are multiple ways to get international links. Like anything when it comes to link building, it isn't easy. If you know the blunders ahead of time, your odds of actually getting a link would be greatly improved.

When it comes to an international SEO, most of the rules are the same like having a site that can easily be crawled. Make sure your pages are ripe with relevant content and have good quality links pointing to it. Here are the top blunders that companies have to avoid in order to increase the odds of getting a link:

Not Focusing on Directories

If you roll back SEO for the past few years, the two most prominent ways of getting links were through directories and link exchanges. Pretty soon, the U.S. went from thousands of "relevant" directories to a tiny handful that mattered. In many other cases it would be different.

Directories in many countries are common and hold a lot of weight. They are also easiest to get into if you find relevant ones. Also remember that like Yahoo, many directories require payment.

Link Buying

Google participating in paid link networks will get your site banned if you get caught. Yahoo Japan was literally spammed to death because of not regulating paid links. You will find that the most useful sites to get links from have a webmaster or SEO specialist that expects some sort of payment for their hard work in getting their site to its current level. Besides that, its widely known that every bit of space on a site has unprecedented value.

Translated and Offensive Content

Do your readers and yourself a favor by getting a native to really translate your content to the target market. (Including same language content…American English translated to British English.)

Poor URLs

In most of the cases this is a blunder that you dont have much control over. You can run out and get a ccTLD, have a directory structure, or even a subdomain structure that has your webmaster tools allocating the spiders to the correct country's content. It is not about spiders in this case. But the problems arise when you are trying to get links.

Your URLs should be entirely localized. You don't want to risk losing your chance on a link as the URLs aren't localized, even if your content is.