Backlinks which are also known as external links refer to the links pointing from one website to another website. Building the number of quality backlinks to your website is getting the authority and the vote from another website because sites that have more quality backlinks probably rank on the first page of google for the other SERPs. link building is one of the difficult tasks of the SEO strategy and it should be one of the most crucial parts.
In this guide I will walk you through the complete guide of backlinks right from their meaning to building it for your site this guide will be all about how you can start making backlinks for your site and the main advantages it will provide to your site.
Let’s get started
Advantages of backlinks
Before we talk about the advantages of backlinks you need to know that much has changed about backlinks from the past couple of years. before low-quality links are used to help in ranking a site. But after Google rolled out its Penguin update that the whole structure of backlinks has changed.
In today’s time, it is very important to have backlinks from quality sites and backlinks should be contextual as well for example if you have a website about technology and your taking links from a food website then these links are irrelevant and google will not consider them in ranking.
So make sure you build links that are quality and relevant to your niche as well if you’re not getting links from the relevant websites or links from the same niche your site will rank in the SERPs. you should also look up to the authority of the website.
Now let’s dive into why they are important for your website
Faster Indexing
Search engine bots will discover new web pages by following backlinks from existing pages only when they’ll discover your website and crawl your site with the help of backlinks.
It will be more difficult for search engine bots to discover your site and index it if you do not have any backlinks so it is important for the new sites to have backlinks as they will help in faster indexing of the site.
Search engine bots will not identify your site easily if you don’t have backlinks let’s not forget and get things straight that they are one of the important factors of ranking your site in SERPs.
Improves Organic Ranking
Backlinks help in better ranking on the search engine. if your content is getting more links from the other sites then it automatically ranks on the first page of google or the SERPs ( search engine result pages). If your content doesn’t have any links then you should start building them proactively.
The important to be noticed here is that your goal should be to build links for the posts and the pages along with building links to your homepage because that will provide authority to your site.
People say that building links to your homepage will build your authority strongly which eventually helps in ranking on the top position.
Referral Traffic
The major benefit of backlinks is that you get referral traffic the person who is reading the blog might click on the links to read more and they will land upon the page.
As they land on the page they will read and they are fewer chances of leaving the page which eventually comes down to less bounce rate. Referral traffic has less bounce rate.
Another advantage of backlinks is audience from the particular post might end up being your reader and they might start consuming your content.
Why Backlinks Are Important In SEO Strategy
Backlinks are one of the most important seo ranking factors and even google confirmed that backlinks are the major ranking factor and the important ranking signals of the website.
Getting backlinks from reputable sources and an authority website is one of the great ways to raise brand awareness and recognition but what makes high-quality backlinks?
Trust is the only important factor of backlinks and if a site with reputation and high authority links to your site then it is a strong ranking factor. if you have links from the sites that are spammy in the eyes of google then those sites will not provide you any kind of favor.
Google trust backlinks from the trusted and the authoritative sites and it will rank the sites according to the authority and trust. The trust comes from the page rank or the algorithm of google that evaluates the quality and the quantity of the backlinks that are pointing to the page or the site.
Different Types Of Backlinks?
As it is said earlier that all backlinks are not the same and each backlink have its own advantages in this I’ll walk you through the kinds of backlinks.
Let’s dive into which backlink your site can acquire in order to rank on the top pages of the search engines.
Dofollow Links
Do follow link is the link that passes the trust and indicates google bots to crawl it and pass authority and also it contains a do-follow attribute with this google will understand that it is the do-follow link.
Do-follow backlinks are the trusted backlinks and most people build do-follow backlinks. You giving a signal to google about the crawling and the page ranking of the particular link.
Now you might be wondering how can I know that the link is do-follow or no-follow well you can know that with the attribute. The attribute contains a string of do-follow or no-follow which helps Google to identify.
Do follow link looks like this
< a href=https://www.yourdomainname.com/ “>this is follow link </a>
Nofollow links
Links are one of the trusted resources and they work like votes for the authority building but if you want to link and don’t want google to consider that like or crawl that link then you can put the attribute as no-follow.
The Google bots will not crawl your link and they will not index that link the attribute of no-follow is “rel=nofollow” your indicating google not to pass the page rank or trust to that particular link.
It is believed that No-follow links do not help passing authority and PageRank. They don’t help you in ranking higher in SERPs. google;e announced in September 2019 that they are evolving with the no-follow attributes when no-follow was introduced google could not any link that is market this way used as a signal to rank to use on search engines. But this has changed now all the links are treated as hints and which links should be included or excluded.
There are some people who believe that this change which google considers hint is treated like google will pass page ranking to your site. But google will pass page ranking or trust through the Nofollow link but in some instances, Google does that not all the time.
Nofollow links looks like
< a href=https://www.domain.com/ “ rel= nofollow”>this is nofollow link </a>
UGC Links
UGC links also known as user-generated links are the links that come from the sites like forums and the comment sections of a blog. When a reader comments on a particular blog then that link is a UGC link and it contains the attribute as ” rel= ugc”.
The attribute informs google that the particular link is placed by the user ad, not the webmaster. These links are from the blog’s comments and sites of forums where the users interact and comment.
UGC link looks like this
< a href=https://www.example .com/ rel= “ugc”>this is ugc link </a>
Sponsored Links
You might have paid for a link on the post or a review of your post of one of your products on the other sites. If money or product or service is return in exchange then the link should be sponsored link and the attribute of the sponsored link is “rel=sponsored” is added to inform google that it’s a sponsored link.
Paying or gifting to get a link is a violation of google’s webmaster guidelines and if you don’t add a sponsored attribute then it will impact your site negatively and avoid that violation and negative impact of your site sponsored link came into the picture.
Sponsored link looks like this
< a href=https://www.example .com/ rel= “sponsored”>this is sponsored link </a>
Links With High Quality
Now that we have discussed the types of backlinks and their attributes let’s dive into how to find out the quality of the links. Using the backlink audit tool you can find out how many backlinks a site has and referring domains of those backlinks. You can also find out the toxicity of those backlinks.
If you want you can dive deeper into the backlink audit tool to get the complete metrics of the site like the number of referring domains, authority score, and toxicity score.
You can also integrate the google search console if you want to check up on the links to your site.
Of course, the goal is to get high authority backlinks and links from sites related to your site. Here are the factors which will determine if the link is a quality link.
- Number of referring domains
- Position of the page( the higher it is the better)
- Backlinks that are contextual ( links that are surrounded by the related content on the page)
- Related anchor text
As mentioned above that google sees authority through its PageRank algorithm but that’s no longer a considered metric by google. they stopped updating PageRank and retired its toolbar in 2016.
However, now google consider whether a link is an authority or not through its credibility and the quality of the content shared with the users and if the site is providing value to the
Bad links or toxic links
Bad links or wrong links may harm your website and the ability to rank the site. If you have bad links that might negatively impact your site. Bad links are referred to as toxic links.
Toxic backlinks come from low-quality or suspicious websites or that are in violation of the google webmaster and they exist to manipulate the search engine ranking. These links include paid links that are not marked by sponsored or nofollow attributes.
If you want to find out toxic links or unnatural links then you can use the backlink audit tool to get the number of unnatural links or toxic links.
Editorial links placement
Google rewards or passes the authority to the editorially placed links. These links are the ones where a webmaster or a journalist has taken the decision to link to other websites to enhance the content and to provide more value to the readers. These links are not to manipulate the search engine or the rankings.
They are purely based on the quality of the content and the value it can provide to the reader.
Procedure to check backlinks of any website
If you want to build a link-building campaign or see the links of the competitors to outrank them and whether you want to get the tactics of building links you’ll have to dive into the backlink tools to get the complete insight of your profile.
Now coming down to the boiling point what are the tools used to check that well there are many tools in the market that will provide you complete analysis of the insights.
There are two tools that are useful in checking are google search console and Semrush if you want to check the competitor’s backlinks to outrank them then SEMrush is the best tool and if you want to check your backlinks then google search console will give you the analysis of your website.
Create Backlinks for your website
Now let’s discuss few points to build links for your website and what are the points you need to keep in check while building links for your website.
- reach out to the people in your niche
- Use the niche-specific directories
- Write guest posts
- Create ebooks, guides, and free courses
- Post content on social media
- Build a community
- Analyze your competitor’s backlinks and identify the opportunities from them.
- Create a document on research
- Create web mentions.
Keep your backlink game in order
Backlinks are one of the key factors to rank your content but it’s not all about building links having one link which is quality is worth a thousand links which are bad links. There are a lot of experts in the market who will focus on building links but a lot of other people who focus on building links with the other tactics as mentioned above.
Always focus on building great links and you will see how your blog will skyrocket on the search engine in no time your aim should be building great links with a higher authority.
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