What Are Backlinks?
Backlinks are when another website links back to your site. They are also known as external links and inbound links.
Backlinks are highly valuable for SEO (search engine optimization). They provide a vote of confidence for your website and your content.
According to OptinMonster, sites with the highest number of backlinks tend to rank higher on Google.
With many websites linking back to your site, it sends a positive signal to the search engine, showing that your content offers value and is link-worthy. In return, the search engine will improve your website’s rankings and visibility on the search results.
Types of Backlinks
There are two basic types of backlinks, and one is more valuable than the other. Let’s look at each one and how they affect your site.
- A Nofollow tag tells search engines to ignore a link. They don’t pass any value from one site to another. So, typically they aren’t helpful in improving your search rank or visibility.
- Dofollow links are the type of backlink that everyone wants. Just keep in mind that those coming from respected sites hold the most value. This kind of backlink can help improve your search engine rankings.
However, there are dofollow links that are considered being bad or ‘toxic’. These links come from suspicious sites or are gained by breaking the search engine terms of service.
This may cause Google to penalize or even de-index your site. Remember, it’s not about the number of backlinks, but rather the quality that makes the difference in ranking.
How Do Backlinks Work?
Backlinks play an important role in search engine algorithm, SEO, and your overall strategy for growing your website.
The easiest way to think of backlinks would be conversations among websites.
For example, Jack is a blogger, and he writes a very interesting article about a Race event.
Another blogger, Nikole, links to Jack’s article when sharing her perspective. Since she writes about the topic on her well-known online magazine site, this creates a backlink to Jack’s post.
Because the online magazine is popular, many other sites will link back to her article. This increases the online magazine’s authority, and Jack’s article also gets a valuable backlink from a reputable site.
Basically, it’s a win-win.
Why are backlinks important?
- Ranking
Search engines like Google see backlinks as votes of confidence. Generally speaking, the more votes your web pages have, the more likely they are to rank for relevant search queries.
- Discoverability
Search engines find new content by revisiting pages they already know about to check for new links
Because search engines revisit popular pages more often than unpopular ones, they may discover your content faster if you get backlinks from popular pages.
- Referral traffic
Backlinks exist to point people to useful resources. That’s why they’re clickable.
When someone clicks on a link to your website, you get referral traffic.
How to get quality backlinks
Once your site is ready for backlinks, it’ll be tempting to get as many as you can. But the quality of your backlinks matters more than the quantity. In fact, the wrong links will actually hurt your search engine results instead of helping your organic traffic.
Here are the criteria that determine whether a backlink is good for your link building strategy:
- Relevance
Some backlink opportunities will be perfect for you. These are the ones that come from pages directly related to your product or service.
- Authority
Google uses algorithms to determine a website’s authoritativeness. The company used to publish the details of the algorithm—known as PageRank—but it stopped doing that a few years ago. Now the only way to figure out a page's official ranking is to go through the algorithm yourself.
It's much easier—and less brain-melting—to use a third-party tool like Ahrefs or Open Site Explorer. And since none of the tools available today are perfectly aligned with Google, so it's best to use more than one.
- Link quality
Most of the time, you can trust a site with high scores on third-party evaluation sites. But there are also some malicious sites that know how to game the system. Sites can pretend to be authoritative by falsifying reviews, testimonials, and ratings, but the overall quality of the domain will tell you the truth.
If you go into a third-party tool like Ahrefs and analyze the domain that your potential backlink comes from, you can tell if it's ranking well for multiple keywords and driving traffic. Manipulated sites won't top that list.
- Outbound link quality
Whenever you have the opportunity to pick up a backlink from a site, visit it and check out what other outbound links they have. Are they organically placed, or did someone clearly force them in there? Do a thorough quality check. If the site looks like it accepts relevant and authoritative links, and it places them appropriately, you can feel good about your link being there as well.
- Indexing status
Don't bother getting backlinks from any site that isn't indexed. If a site isn't in the index, it will never show up on an organic search.
Sites get indexed when Google's spider crawler visits and explores them, following links to find out what's there. Each page it discovers will have either an index or a no-index meta tag, and the spider files that page in the index or not as instructed.
Fortunately, it's really easy to find out whether a site is indexed. If you have a backlink offer from supermindset.com, just do a Google search for “site:supermindset.com.” If it doesn't appear in the results, don't accept the offer.
How to get quality backlinks
1. Ask Your Suppliers to Link to You
If you sell other people’s products, you will find that many of your supplier’s websites include a 'where to buy' page with details (and links) for each.
2. Use HARO to Respond to Requests From Journalists
HARO (Help A Reporter Out) is an established platform where journalists seek sources and quotes for upcoming stories. Sign up and receive three source request emails every day (Monday to Friday), which are relevant to you or your client's industry.
If there is a request which matches your experience, send a response by the stated deadline and, if yours is used, there is a good chance you will earn a link too.
As a word of warning, though, not every submission is successful or earns a link. Make sure you only respond when you can add value through your experience and be clear that you would expect to be credited with a link.
3. Guest Post
Today, guest blogging remains a great tactic for earning links and sharing your insights and experience from topically relevant industry publications. Let’s say you are a Marketer and are looking to write guest posts.
Head over to Google and run a search for: marketing intitle:"write for us"
Using the intitle advanced search operator alongside a keyword means you will get results from pages that include “write for us.”Here are the returned results:
These are relevant websites that are looking for contributors to who you could pitch guest post ideas to.
4. Use Niche-specific Directories
Most industries and niches have active directories that recommend and showcase companies operating in that sector. You will also find that local variants of these exist for many towns and cities. As with guest posting, you can use Google to find these opportunities.
5. Turn Brand Mentions Into Links
Most businesses find themselves covered in the press, be that regionally, nationally, or internationally from time to time — be it because of a new product or service you have launched, a new hire, or even a charity drive. Whatever the reason, it is not uncommon for mentions in the press not to link. But, the hard work is done — securing the coverage.
It is always worth following up with the journalist or editor when you have been mentioned in the press without a link and asking them to add it in. While some won’t, others will, and it is a really easy way to earn some great quality links.
6. Become Cited as a Resource
If you have spent time creating great content or a great product, you should look to build links by being cited as a resource.
Opportunities like this exist in all sectors, and you can take the same approach using great content as well as your main product or service.
7. Analyze Your Competitor’s Backlink Profile To Identify Opportunities
If you are looking to identify opportunities to earn the links which are helping your competitors to rank, you can spend time analyzing their backlink profile to identify opportunities that you could follow up on.
In fact, you can use Solvid or Mangools Linkminer tool to help you to do just this and discover untapped backlink opportunities for you to pursue.
It is a great way for you to identify gaps in your competitors’ link-building strategies and prioritize opportunities where you have established that one or more competitors have earned links from a domain that you haven’t.
Link building has changed significantly over the last decade, but it is for the best. so when you come across them in the future, you know what advice to follow and what you should avoid.
- The More Links You Have, the Higher You Will Rank
We can understand where this one comes from, but it is not necessarily true. As we have already shown, not all links are equal, and one great link from a newspaper or top industry publication could be worth hundreds of low-quality links from blog comments on unrelated posts. Link building isn’t just a number game — you need to earn quality links at scale.
- You Shouldn’t Bother Earning Nofollowed Links
Nofollowed links haven’t had an impact on your SEO performance, but in September 2019, Google announced that this is now a hint, not a directive.
Many SEOs believe that, based on other signals, Google may choose to follow a link that has a nofollow attribute applied in cases such as top-tier newspapers who apply an automatic nofollow to all external links. Aside from this, nofollow links still send traffic and boost your credibility.
So long as the links are relevant and from trusted sources, you shouldn’t discount a link simply because it is nofollowed.
- Buying Links is a Quick Way to Boost Your Rankings
You should not be buying links (or gifting free products in exchange for a link) as this is a direct violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines, and doing this could see your rankings negatively affected or even a penalty imposed.
If you are sponsoring content for other reasons besides getting a link, you need to be using the rel=”sponsored” attribute.
- You Receive a Penalty If You Earn Too Many Links
There has been an age-old myth that earning too many links in a short period of time will result in your site getting a penalty, but this is all it is. That is simply the nature of virality, and you certainly wouldn’t be penalized for this. So long as you are building quality links, you don’t need to worry about earning ‘too many. This myth comes from those buying unnatural links.
Summary
Backlinks are a key ranking factor and one which you can’t ignore if you want to rank higher on Google. Link building is an expansive field of SEO in its own right, and you will find many specialists who focus only on this area, Build great links, and you will see an increase in your rankings; just be sure to keep an eye out for what your competitors are doing and jump onto fresh opportunities as quickly as you can.
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