Meaning, Methods and The Importance of Backlinks in SEO

If you’ve taken even the shallowest dive into the world of SEO, you’ve probably heard of backlinks.

And that’s how it should be, because If Search Engine Optimization were a song, backlinks would be the chorus.

They are that important.

Quite simply, they’re an essential element lying at the foundation of any website that actually gets found.

What is a backlink?

A backlink is created when a page of another website links to a page on yours. For example, Moz.com would consider the second word in this paragraph to be a backlink, because it leads users from a different site to theirs.

Backlinks are important to search engines because they are a signal that the site being linked to has quality, worthwhile information on a topic relevant to the site linking to it. You can think of it as a digital vote of confidence.

The definition of a quality backlink, and the determination of how much value a backlink adds to a site’s search rankings has also changed over time.

There are a variety of different types of backlinks, and the SEO benefit provided to the website receiving them differs.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BACKLINK IN SEO

On the basis of relevancy of keywords to the sites and the number of high-quality backlinks that are pointing back to a website is highly considered by the search engines. These make a sound ground for ranking a website and determining its comparative position. Quality backlinks work as a hallmark of better SEO. It is the high important factor of the online marketing procedure, so that you not only improve the visibility, generate traffic and get the pot SERP appearance.

Now, what is the quality backlink? When there is a link pointing towards your website plus the content on that site is highly relevant to your site, it is a quality backlink. Relevancy is a key element and it proportionally increases with quality. As you increase the relevancy, it will simply improve your quality and as a result, your traffic, ranking, and reputation altogether will increase.

Contextual vs. Non-Contextual links

A Contextual link is a link that is surrounded by text, like the one at the beginning of this sentence.

Contextual links are the most valuable type of link for a variety of reasons:

1. They are extremely relevant to the content that directly surrounds them
2. They make it easy for users to expand their knowledge base on a specific topic
3. They provide the opportunity to use valuable keywords as anchor text

Google understands these benefits and places more value on contextual links because of them.

Internal contextual links (contextual links that link to a different page on the same website) are beneficial because they increase the amount of pages viewed by a website visitor, thus decreasing bounce rate and increasing time on page. However, keep in mind that when creating links within your own website, Google won’t assign as much value to the backlink as if it were to come from an external source.

An example of a non-contextual link would be a link in an online directory or in a content roundup.

These backlinks can still be really beneficial, they just don’t hold as much weight as contextual links because they are less specific and less intertwined with the user experience of the linking site.

Types of Backlinks

There are hundreds of types of backlinks and even more ways to get them. Here are a few examples:

1. Contextual links from another website
2. Contextual links from guest blogging on another site
3. Inclusion in a content roundup
4. Inclusion on a resource page
5. Online professional directories
6. Forum posts and/or comments
7. Inclusion of a link in a testimonial
8. Inclusion of a link in a social media post

Some of these backlink types are much more beneficial to SEO than others, and some have no effect on SEO whatsoever.

More on that later. [Link to do follow vs. no follow heading]

Now that we know what backlinks are, let’s dive into how they became important and why they continue to be one of Google’s top ranking factors.

Google Panda and Its Aftermath

Back in the day, a website’s search rankings lived and died by its number of backlinks.

As Moz likes to describe the state of link building in the early days of the internet,

“Links on the web can be interpreted as votes that are cast by the source of the target.”

These votes were all considered to hold equal value, meaning a backlink from any website would boost search rankings an equal amount.

Because of this immense opportunity, webmasters scrambled to get their company on as many online directories as possible, knowing that this would improve their search rankings.

Clients paid SEO companies to fabricate spam links from link farms (a group of websites where each site links to all other sites in the group).

Through these methods and other link schemes, a website could gain thousands of backlinks.

Backlink quantity, at the time, signaled to Google that the site was a high-quality, reputable source and it therefore boosted their results in search rankings.

This strategy worked well until Google caught on that people were taking advantage.

In 2011, Google released its Panda update, which among many other major changes to SEO, began to penalize websites with undeserved links.

With the update, Google shifted the emphasis on backlinks from quantity to quality. It was no longer possible to cheat the system and come out on top of competitors with fewer, yet higher quality backlinks.

This led to many websites with massive amounts of traffic losing huge portions of it essentially overnight.

What is PageRank and what are its implications?

One of the major factors coming out of Google Panda, specifically pertaining to backlinks, were simultaneous improvements to Google’s PageRank algorithm.

PageRank and its evolution over time is the best way of understanding how Google assesses the quality and relevance of backlinks, and how those backlinks will consequently affect a website’s search rankings.

Earlier, we discussed the idea of a backlink as a vote of confidence from one site to another. Initially, all votes on the internet were considered by Google to hold equal importance, and therefore equal SEO implications.

With PageRank, Google implemented a method for assessing the SEO weight of a backlink based on the importance and quality of the linking site.

In other words, links from more authoritative, well established websites would have a greater effect on SEO.

But Google’s criteria for analyzing the value of backlinks didn’t stop there. It continued evolving:

According to Search Engine Land,

“Important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines allaspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.”

BUILDING BACKLINKS REQUIRE PATIENCE

Backlink building is slow, steady and a continuous process. You cannot build the quality backlinks within a couple of days. If while it is concerned with a newly created website, there are almost zero chances of getting the fast and natural links. Instead of praying for any miracle or moving towards any unethical methods, you should start relating quality content, building links, and driving the relevant traffic to your site.

Now, how to do this? Usually, writing guest posts on a reputed website in your specific is the common and popular method of doing so. A point that you must consider while writing for the other website that your primary aim should not be getting the links in the author bio. At the first, you have to work hard and create a good content so that you can stand up in front of the whole community of audiences.

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HERE ARE SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR SCALING YOUR GUEST POSTING TECHNIQUE:

1. Instead of writing only for the websites with “write for us” page, you need to look for the well-known sites of your niche and you can get better quality links without these pages.
2. You don’t have to waste your time and efforts on writing content for the sites whose domain authority is lower than yours. Eventually, there will be a quite low value of your link and it will end up without further notice to you.
3. While writing for other websites, write for more than one time, it will sound your claim for the good link and also, you will be able to build good relations with the website and its audiences.
4. Target your efforts on the No-follow links. It is good to get more followers on social media.
5. Regularly monitor your links and keep track of all of your backlinks by using some of the various SEO tools available out there. In this process, you will have an idea about the existence status of your link on the site.
6. Never forget to link to your social media profile in the article’s author bio.

AVOID LEAVING FOOTPRINTS ON YOUR BACKLINKS

It is a common mistake made by the SERP professionals that they leave footprints while building the backlinks. You need to work on building links which look natural and organic. Using the given tips can be helpful:

1. As a guest blogger, use a completely different pen name and change your author bio.
2. Avoid using the same description for your website to all the sites you are writing for.
3. Try to build links that they look natural and untraceable.

THE BACKLINKS THAT YOU SHOULD AVOID

There are several types of backlinks that should not be a part of your backlink profile. For your wonder, without your knowledge, there can be various spammy links that harm your website and you cannot control them.

FOLLOWING ARE THE EXAMPLES OF SUCH BAD BACKLINKS:

1. The links from the sites or pages with little or poor content. Google never gives them much value and of course, these links carry a little SEO value.
2. The sites that don’t provide any value to the users. This category of the sites includes social bookmarking sites, web directories, and the article directories. All these have their use for the SEO purpose only and the search engines, especially Google doesn’t give them any special credit. One more difficulty with these sites. The link submitted to any such, it is very difficult to remove.
3. Comments spam. Everybody hates spam, also google. By posting the spammy comments, you will certainly lose your reputation. It will also harm your ranking in the SERPs. Remember, the No-follow comments are also treated suspiciously if been abused.

Well, I’ve described the meaning, methods and the importance of backlinks in SEO. If you have any suggestions then share with us.

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