Ultimate Guide To SEO Backlinks
Ultimate Guide To SEO Backlinks
Table of Contents
What Are Backlinks & Why They Are Important
In simple terms, backlinks are links from other websites to your website. When someone links to your site, it’s like they’re giving you a vote of confidence. Backlinks are important because they are one of the main factors that search engine like Google uses to determine the quality and relevancy of your site. The more backlinks you have from high-quality websites, the higher your site will rank in search results.
How Do Backlinks Work?
When a webmaster links to your site, they’re essentially telling search engines that your site is worth linking to. This increases your site’s authority and helps it to rank higher in search results.
Types Of Backlinks
There are two types of backlinks: dofollow and nofollow.
Dofollow links are the kind of links that pass along link juice, that can help improve your search engine ranking. They’re called dofollow because they “dofollow” the link back to your website. That means that Google will follow the link and count it as a vote for your website.
Nofollow backlinks are links that don’t pass along link juice. They are the opposite of dofollow links. They’re called nofollow because they don’t “dofollow” the link back to your website. That means that Google won’t follow the link and won’t count it as a vote for your website.
Nofollow links don’t have much SEO value, but they can still be useful for driving traffic to your website. That’s because people can click on a nofollow link and be taken to your website.
Should I Focus on Dofollow or Nofollow Links?
In general, you should focus on getting dofollow links from high-quality websites. But don’t ignore nofollow links altogether. They can still be helpful for driving traffic to your website.
Which Type of Backlinks Are The Best?
The most useful type of backlinks for you are dofollow links from authoritative sites on relevant subjects where your link appears naturally and contextually. They deliver the greatest value and help you improve your search engine rankings.
To give you a better idea, here are some of the best types of backlinks in no particular order:
- comes from a website on a relevant topic like yours
- comes from an authoritative site in the industry (gets relevant traffic from Google)
- comes from a web page that has other backlinks pointing to it
- comes from a web page that has a good amount of content and relevant content
- the link is a dofollow link and passes full value
- the anchor text mentions some of your target keyword or brand name
- the specific page that links to you is relevant to your page it links to
How Many Backlinks Do I Need?
There’s no magic number of backlinks that you need to get. But in general, the more high-quality backlinks you have, the better. That’s because Google uses the quality of your backlinks as a signal of the quality of your website.
So if you have a lot of high-quality backlinks, that’s a good sign that your website is also high quality.
Of course, it’s not just about quantity. It’s also about quality. A single backlink from a popular and respected website will do more for your SEO than a hundred backlinks from low-quality websites. So it’s important to focus on getting backlinks from high-quality websites.
Do You Want Your Site To Rank On Google 1st Page?
Good Vs. Bad Backlinks: How Do You Tell The Difference?
A lot of people often make the mistake of thinking that all backlinks are equally important and powerful. However, this is not the case. If your website has dozens of quality backlinks from high-quality websites, it can help improve your search rankings.
On the other hand, if you have bad backlinks, like those from low-quality websites, Google and other search engine platforms will downgrade your website ranking. That’s why it’s important to be selective about the backlinks you build.
So how do you tell the difference between a good backlink and a bad backlink?
How Can You Tell if a Backlink is Good or Bad?
There are a few factors that you can use to judge whether a backlink is good or bad. First, take a look at the website that’s linking to you. If it’s a high-quality site with a lot of traffic, then the link is probably good. If it’s a low-quality site with little traffic, then the link is probably bad.
You can also check the link’s anchor text. If the anchor text is relevant to your site, then the link is probably good. If the anchor text is irrelevant or stuffed with keywords, then the link is probably bad.
Good Backlinks
The easiest way to differentiate between good and bad backlinks is to look at the source website. If your backlink comes from a website that has a high domain authority, it will be categorized as a good backlink. In addition to this, the referring page should also offer similar content to your website. For instance, if your website writes about electronics gadgets, you cannot obtain backlinks from a website that primarily focuses on sneakers. The underlying industry should be the same.
Bad Backlinks
A bad backlink, on the other hand, comes from an irrelevant website with low domain authority. Spammy, toxic and low-quality backlinks are the types of bad backlinks that can get you into trouble with Google. These links usually come from low-quality websites created by people who are trying to negative SEO against your site, in other words trying to hurt your search engine ranking.
How To Assess The Quality Of A Backlink?
You can use Google Search Console to check who’s linking to your website and to get a list of websites that link to you the most. Then check the quality of these backlinks using an SEO tool like Moz’s Open Site Explorer.
This tool will show you information about the website that’s linking to you, including its domain authority score and page authority score. The higher these numbers are, the better.
In general, you want to have backlinks coming from high-quality websites with a lot of domain authority.
How To Build Backlinks To Your Site?
Now that you know what backlinks are and how they work, it’s time to learn how to get them. Here are a few strategies that you can use to build backlinks for your website.
Link Baiting
Link baiting is the process of creating content that’s designed to get other people to link to it. This can be anything from a funny video to an informative article. The goal is to get as many people as possible to link to your content, which will help improve your search engine ranking.
Manual Outreach
Manual outreach is the process of reaching out to other websites or bloggers and asking them to link to your site. This can be done by emailing the webmaster or leaving a comment on their blog. When you’re doing manual outreach, it’s important to make sure that you’re only contacting websites that are relevant to your niche, and sites that are indexed by Google that have decent organic traffic to their sites. Otherwise, you’ll just be wasting your time.
Guest Posting
Guest posting involves writing an article for someone else’s website in your niche. This is a great way to get exposure for your website and build relationships with other bloggers in your niche. When you guest post, make sure that you include a link back to your site in your author bio. This will give people the opportunity to visit your site when they read your article.
Blog Comments
Blog comments are a type of backlink that you can get by leaving a comment on someone else’s blog. Most of these links are usually nofollow, which means they don’t have much value for SEO. However, if you can find a blog with a high PageRank, leaving a comment can still be beneficial.
Forum Posting
Forum posting is another way to get backlinks. This involves leaving a link to your website in the signature of your posts on forums. Like blog comments, most of these links are nofollow, but they can still be helpful for driving traffic to your site.
Directory & Listing Submission
Directory submission is the process of submitting your website to online directories. You can also find websites that list resources in your industry and submit your website to be included. This is a great way to get high-quality backlinks, but it can also be time-consuming.
Social Profiles
Social profile links are a type of backlink that you can get by creating profiles on social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These links are usually nofollow, but they can still be helpful for driving traffic to your site.
Social Bookmarks
Social bookmarks are a type of backlink that you can get by bookmarking your website on social bookmarking sites like Delicious or Digg. These links are usually nofollow, but they can still be helpful for driving traffic to your site.
Infographics
Create an infographic and submit it to an infographic directory. Infographics are a great way to get backlinks because they’re easy to share. When you create an infographic, make sure to include a link back to your site. This will help people find your site when they’re looking for more information on the topic.
These are just a few of the many ways that you can get backlinks for your website. Link building should be an ongoing process. Although it is time-consuming and requires planning, the effort is worth it because of the benefits that backlinks can provide. If you’re looking for help in getting more quality backlinks, you can engage our professional SEO service which includes link-building as one of our services.
Do You Want To Build High Quality Backlinks To Your Site?
Importance Of Building High-Quality Backlinks
If you want to improve your SEO rankings and organic traffic, it’s important to focus on getting high-quality backlinks.
High-quality backlinks are links that come from reputable websites with relevant content. For example, if you have a website about gardening, a backlink from a website about flowers would be considered high quality. On the other hand, a backlink from a spammy website would be considered low quality. Here are some ways to get high-quality backlinks:
Editorial Backlinks
The basic purpose of backlinks is to increase the overall authenticity and reliability of a website. This is where editorial backlinks play a vital role. When another website quotes your content for specific information or uses your articles for their website and places a link in their content, it is referred to as editorial backlinks.
If you want more editorial backlinks, you will have to create your position in the industry as a thought leader and as a pioneer. Everybody can copy and paste existing content. However, if you can develop brand-new content or interview leaders and post that content on your website, other websites will use your content as a reference. It will help you generate many editorial backlinks, and popular search engines will rank your website higher than the rest.
Guest Blogging Backlinks
Suppose you have a professional business and you consider yourself as a true organization. In that case, you must have set up several business listings on various social media and business platforms, such as Yelp, LinkedIn, etc.
This is when you can take advantage of profile descriptions and use backlinks to your website.
Search engines see these backlinks as evidence of a professionally established website. Moreover, customers also prefer businesses that have well-established business profiles and backlinks to their original website.
Business Profile Backlinks
Just because you write content for your website does not mean that you cannot regularly post guest content on high-authority websites. This is why you should have a list of popular and high-authority websites in your industry.
This way, you can write popular content for that website and link them back to your website using a guest blogging backlink.
It will offer you two different benefits; guest blogging backlinks and editorial backlinks for your website.
Your content will be on an authority website, and there will also be a backlink to your website on a powerful platform. It will help you increase your SEO rankings.
Outreach Backlinks
This is among the simplest forms of backlinks for beginners and new businesses. These kind of backlinks are also useful for small businesses that are just starting their professional journey.
The core idea behind these backlinks is that you can manually contact website owners and bloggers for different authoritative websites and ask them to link to you.
You can pay them for backlinks, or you can promise them services in return for your backlinks. You can also encourage them to visit your website and offer you a backlink if they believe your website is worthy.
Therefore, powerful and authoritative websites will automatically offer you backlinks and help you increase your SEO ranking. However, you will need powerful networking skills to create manual outreach backlinks.
Avoid Non-Editorial Links
These carry less weight and offer less value than other forms of backlinks. However, these also require less time, and you can randomly post a backlink to your website on different relevant videos or articles of your industry.
What Do You Do With The Bad Backlinks?
Bad backlinks like spammy, toxic or low-quality links from unauthorized and untrusted sources, can harm your website and respective SEO rankings. Your website can face heavy Google penalties.
This is why you need to take care of bad backlinks as soon as possible. This process is also referred to as the disavowing the links.
When you disavow a link, Google will ignore the link when it’s crawling the web. However, they will not remove the link from your backlink profile. This can be helpful if you’ve been hit by a negative SEO attack.
To disavow the URLs of the questionable pages or domains that link to your website, you will need to use Google’s Disavow tool. However, you need to use the Google’s Disavow tool with caution. As highlighted on Google’s Search Console, if used incorrectly “this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google Search results”.
To reduce the risk of incorrect use, you can engage a professional SEO agency like ours to assist you with the entire backlink audit and disavow procedure.
Before you begin the process of disavowing backlinks, you need to understand how to identify bad backlinks. To determine whether you have good links or bad links is to audit all the backlinks that point to your website.
You can use Google Search Console or SEO tools such as SEMRush, Ahrefs, Moz, and Majestic to extract your backlink profile. Once you have the list of backlinks, you need to manually check each link to see if it’s a good or bad link. This process can be time-consuming, which is why we recommend that you engage a professional SEO agency like ours to help you.
How to disavow backlinks in the Google search console?
To disavow backlinks in the Google search console, you will need to upload a text file that contains the links that you want to disavow.
Steps for disavowing:
- Compile your list of backlinks or domains to disavow in a text file that you will upload to Google.
- Go to the disavow links tool page.
- Select a property from the property list.
- Click the button to upload your list.
- Choose the disavow file that contains the list of links you want to disavow from your computer
- Click the Upload button.
If the file has any errors, you will see a list of errors immediately. You can fix the errors and try to upload it again.
If the upload is successful, it can take a few weeks for Google to incorporate your disavow list into the index as Google recrawls the web and reprocess the pages that we see.
For more instructions, you can visit Google’s help page on the topic: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en
As mentioned earlier, Google’s Disavow tool is a powerful way to remove bad backlinks, but it should be used with caution. If you use it incorrectly, you could end up disavowing good backlinks along with bad ones.
When Should You Disavow Backlinks?
There are several reasons why you should disavow an unnatural or a bad backlink from your website. The basic reason for this process is to get rid of a backlink that is spammy or offers low-quality. Bad backlinks can ultimately hurt your SEO rankings in the long run, and it makes sense to get rid of unnatural links by disavowing them.
If you currently have backlinks on your website that come from untrusted sources or spam sites, you need to get rid of these backlinks immediately. Similarly, if your backlinks come from spam comments on different sections for articles and YouTube videos, you need to disavow these links as soon as possible.
Lastly, hundreds of untrusted domains are set up for the core purpose of unethically increasing the SEO rankings for different websites. If your backlink comes from these websites, you need to disavow those links quickly.
How To Protect Your Website From Bad Backlinks Or Negative SEO?
The best way to protect your website from bad backlinks or negative SEO is to regularly monitor your backlink profile. If you see any suspicious links, you should investigate further to determine if the link is good or bad. If it’s a bad link, you can use Google’s Disavow tool to remove it.
You should also keep an eye on your website’s organic traffic and rankings. If you see a sudden drop in traffic or rankings, it could be due to bad backlinks. In this case, you should audit your backlink profile and disavow any suspicious links.
To summarize, good quality backlinks can help improve your search engine ranking while bad backlinks from low-quality and irrelevant websites can harm your search engine ranking. Therefore, it’s important to regularly monitor your backlink profile and disavow any suspicious links. If you need help with this, you can contact us to assist you.
Veronica Lim
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