As the evolution of link building continues unabated, many old – and new – ideas for how links should be built and earned continue to appear and reappear. It wasn’t that long ago that even the simplest and most blatant types of link building would pass muster with search engine algorithms, but today’s world is entirely different.

Sorting through which advice is bad (and that includes both tactics that can backfire and those that simply don’t produce results) can save you a lot of time and frustration in the future. To help you avoid these wasteful situations, let’s examine four more link building lies that you should absolutely forget.

Abandoning Guest Posts

For the past few years, many have gossiped about the role that guest posts continue to play in link building. Some commentary from Google initially fueled the belief that guest posting was an indicator of low quality link building; however, this has since been clarified and revised.

While link building via guest posts on less than credible sites should be avoided, there is no reason why you should stop encouraging others from pinging your website with links via guest posts. As long as the content and the website in question are of good quality, this practice should continue.

Non-Niche Links Are Bad

Context and relevance are of course important in both SEO and link building specifically. Due to especially egregious examples of link abuse over the years, many have drawn conclusions about building links from websites not within the same niche. While a colossal undertaking of non-niche link building can send indicators that your website is spammy, there is no reason not to pursue some backlinks from websites that might not otherwise fit your niche (just be careful not to overdo it).

Internal Links Don’t Matter

With so much focus on earning backlinks from other websites, many fail to consider how internal linking practices can affect SEO. Not only are many failing to consider this process as viable, but many even believe that it can be a negative indicator to search engines.

Fortunately, it is not bad practice and can even boost SEO. By ensuring your pages are thoroughly linked to one another, authority from the higher-performing pages can in effect “flow downstream”, helping to boost other pages on your website.

High Ranking Sites Don’t Need More Links

After a certain point, it may feel as if building additional links isn’t necessary. After all, if you’ve already ascended the ranks of search and are dominating within your SERPs, what’s the point in continuing? Unfortunately for those who follow this advice, their positions are in danger long-term.

Besides the fact that competitors will still be aiming to unseat you and take the top spots for themselves, search engines look at factors such as activity and relevance. If all of the links pinging your website are years old – with no recent backlinks earned – then other websites, including those with fewer links, may surpass you given their links earned are newer and could be more relevant.

With so much disinformation out there, it’s important to uncover the truth. These four common link building lies need to be understood and abandoned in order to ensure the long-term sustainability of your SEO operations.