What is Backlink? Backlink is a link one website gets from another website. Backlinks make a huge impact on a website’s prominence in search engine results. This is why they are considered very useful for improving a website’s SEO ranking. Search engines calculate rankings using multiple factors to display search results.
What is backlink building? Backlink building is the strategy of getting links that lead back to your website on other sites that are viewed as authority figures both by people and by Google. These links will begin to give your website what is called “Domain Authority“.
Domain Authority is a metric created by Moz that is given to your website and informs/predicts how well you rank in search engine. Your Domain Authority is measured on a scale from 1-100. Several websites that have a DA of 100 include Facebook and Wikipedia.
How do backlinks work? Let’s forget the complex definitions and explanations. Let me straightly dive into few points to make you clear:
Backlinks are two types – dofollow (which search engine traverse through) and nofollow which isn’t traversed by search engines.
Do follow passes link juice (passes SEO benefits to the website that’s linked) and no-follow won’t. Do you wonder why nofollow really exists? It’s merely because to stop spammers by getting enefited by search engines. Traffic from external backlinks are counted as referral traffic in Google analytics.
How backlinks are used to be? (in the old time) Search engines used to count the number of backlinks and relevancy to determine which position to rank a website in search engine results.
Anchor text plays a great role in determining relevancy. That’s why old SEOs tend to get thousands anchor texted backlinks and even paid lots of bucks to gain backlinks.
In the past, backlink metric was basically manipulative and anyone can rank first in search engine results. And count of backlinks played a greater role.
What are backlinks now? In the present scenario, if you build tons of anchor-texted backlinks, you’ll get penalized by search engines and thrown down to the third page.
Deep anchor-texted backlink are clearly marked by Google as manipulative and won’t produce the same results as in the past.
Backlink quality is considered as the most important metric now than the count of backlinks.
Here are some best practices of backlinks in this era.
Build backlinks based on semantic keywords. Eg: If your core keyword is “online clothing”, try to build backlinks on related words like men’s clothing, ladies clothing, clothes in India and so on
Thousands of backlinks with a same anchor text produce negative results.Apart from disavowing low quality backlinks, I did see people disavowing their backlinks due to this over anchor text density
Getting 1000 backlinks is proven to be less worthy than 10 high authority backlinks.