If you are asking yourself “What is a Backlink?“, you are asking the right questions, depending on who you ask you would get a different answer. Backlinks, are known as “inbound links” or “incoming links”. They link one website to another. Google and other major search engines consider backlinks as a “thumbs up” from one site to another. Thus pages with a large number of backlinks tend to have high rankings in organic search engines.
These high rankings make search engines show immediate favor.
Why Do We Need Backlinks?
Backlinks are simply votes obtained from other websites. These votes inform search engines this your material is valuable, trustworthy and useful.Thus the higher your site ranks in engines, the more of these “votes” you have.
Backlinks are nothing new, in a search engine algorithm. Backlinks originally provided the base for the initial Google algorithm. Though Google has since made thousands of changes to its algorithm, backlinks remain a key ranking signal.
How To Identify A Good Backlink
Not everything needs to be added as a link to your website, always consider your resources and where it is found. Simply put, you don’t want a vote from everyone. Focus on quality backlinks if you want to rank higher in the SERPs, because a single quality backlink can be more beneficial than 1,000 backlinks of lesser quality.
Consider The Authority of The Website
Always ask yourself if is this site credible? Is this information backed by any research or recognized institution? Thus, always use an authoritative site as a backlink. What is considered to be an authoritative site? An authoritative site or authority site is a site which has jurisdiction on a subject or on specific topics. Simply put, would you prefer the UCLA Medical Research site over some random blog? Although the information might be easy to read, you shouldn’t backlink it.
Use Backlinks That Are Within Your Niche
You might not believe it but, Search Engines care that the websites are in the same niche. Search Engines tend to value the niche links, they want to see that relationship. The backlinks can give the the search engines a quick way to list and categorize your website. Niche backlinks are considered to be better quality.
Don’t Re-Use Links
It might be a drag, you find a great dependable site but you can only link it once. Why? Backlinking to one site repeatedly can deplete the value of the link. Making that one site your primary source causes search engines to become suspicious and disregard every link besides the first.
Beware Of “No-Follow” Links
What are “No-Follow Links”? These are hyperlinks with a rel=”nofollow “tag. Such links do not impact the search engine rankings.This is because search engines don’t “crawl” nofollowed ties. Thus making these backlinks useless. And with a useless backlink it can hurt your SEO.
Conclusion
Earning quality backlinks can be difficult at times, but you can quickly identify link-building opportunities by utilizing the correct tools and methods. Finally, note that it’s as necessary to hold your backlinks as to create them.
Thanks for this informative article on backlinks. I am finding it difficult to get backlinks from some of the better sites, even though I have written to ask them.
Over the years I have gained a few natural backlinks from websites similar to my own, but not overly successful ones. Is it best to leave, or ask the owners to rather not link to me? I find it virtually impossible to get backlinks at the moment from gov sites or Wikipedia, so in the meantime isn’t it better to take what you can get, provided the website involved isn’t a spammy website?
I also wondered if perhaps it was ok to swap backlinks with another website?
Swap at your own risk if you think that the other is a better fit, and it seems that you are already headed in the right direction. No site is perfect and it all takes time. Keep trying!