Backlinks are still important for a site to rank high on SERP. In this article, you will learn the basics, how to create them and how to check your competitor’s and your Backlinks profile.
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What Are Backlinks
A backlink is a link from one page to another. If page A links to page B, we say that page B has a backlink from page A. Backlinks are one of the most important ranking signals. There is a direct correlation between the number and quality of backlinks and the rating.
When someone posts a link to your site, your site gets a backlink from them. When you post a link to another site, it gets a backlink from you. For example, this link leads to YouTube, so YouTube now has a backlink from our site.
Backlinks will be very effective when you optimize your content.
Why Are Backlinks Important?
Backlinks are valuable for three main reasons.
1. Ranking
Search engines like Google consider backlinks as signs of trust. In general, the more trusted your web pages are, the higher they will rank when delivering results for relevant search queries.
The number of backlinks from unique sites (donor domains) strongly correlates with organic search traffic. The higher the backlinks (quality ones) the better for ranking high in search engines.
2. Easy to find (Indexing)
To find new content, search engines review pages they already know, checking them for new links. Since search engines visit popular pages more often than unpopular ones, they will discover your content faster if it is linked back from popular pages which helps to fix indexing issues if your site hasn’t been indexed.
3. Referral traffic
Backlinks help to direct people to what they are most interested in, so people click on them. When someone clicks on a link to your site, you get referral traffic.
Another reason to build backlinks is for an increase in DA or DR, this should be secondary. When building backlinks for ranking or referral traffic, you are automatically increasing your DR or DA but when you build to increase DA or DR, you may not rank or get traffic.
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Types of links
What is a No-follow link?
A no-follow link is a link that contains the rel = ”nofollow ” attribute in its HTML code. It (the nofollow attribute) was introduced by Google in 2005 and requires search engines not to transfer the link juice to the page that the link leads to. Examples, where the Nofollow attribute can be used, include:
Links in comments-helps fight spam in comments, as it makes links in comments less valuable, unlike do-follow links.
Note: From a technical point of view, there is no such thing as “dofollow” backlinks, since there is no “dofollow” parameter. This term is used colloquially to distinguish between links that convey link weight, as opposed to nofollow links.
While No-follow links do not convey authority, they are still important. They can bring other benefits:
- They can serve as a hint for Google — in 2019, Google announced that it will consider nofollow links as hints for better understanding and analyzing links. For example, a link from Wikipedia which is a no-follow link is considered important.
- They can bring you traffic — a nofollow link may not earn you “SEO points”, but it can still bring you relevant traffic.
- They diversify your link profile — Nofollow links are a natural part of every link profile, and it would be suspicious not to have them.
How do I Create a Good Backlink?
1. Free methods
In this method, you will get backlinks without paying for them. This method includes:
1. Natural Links
This is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to get backlinks for your site. As the name suggests, these links are obtained naturally, without any effort on your part. Websites link to your site. This happens if your site has unique, interesting, and useful content (it can be a free tool).
2. Reciprocal backlinks
This is also known as a link exchange. For example, Site A links to site B and site B links to site A. This can be in form of a guest post or link insertion. Link exchange can be regarded as link spam if it’s done excessively and it can affect your SEO.
3. Self-created links
Such links have the least impact on the site’s ranking in search engines (because they can be marked as spam) if you don’t do it right. But they will help attract new visitors to your site.
- You can leave similar backlinks to the site on forums, in comments on blogs and on well-known profile sites. But the information you provide should be valuable and useful (and not just “visit our website, we sell this product”). This can increase your site’s credibility and traffic.
- You can add backlinks to online directories (such as Yelp, Yellow Pages, Google Addresses, and so on). These links are especially useful if you are promoting your business within the same region (citations).
- Guest posts: suggest writing a single post for another site;
- Replacing non-working links: Find relevant “dead” links on other sites, contact the owner and offer to replace them with your working links;
- The skyscraper method: Find relevant content with a lot of links, and then invite those who link to the original to link to you instead, proving convincingly that your version is much better;
- References without links: Find references to your brand without links and tell authors to add links.
This is how many backlinks you should build per day for your site.
Paid Backlinks
Links can be purchased from webmasters and bloggers. This can be in the form of:
- Guest Post
- Link insertion
- PR release and so on
How do I get more backlinks?
There are three ways to get more backlinks: create them (self), earn them (natural), or grow them (paid and self).
Qualities of a Good Backlink
Not all backlinks are equivalent. Here are some of the main characteristics that affect the quality and usefulness of backlinks. Your Backlinks profile should contain all these 3 qualities.
Relevance
This is the easiest to get and easiest to understand. You get relevance from the topic of the article your link came from.
In practice, this means that if, for example, a health website wants to get backlinks from two pages, one of which is dedicated to cars and the other on how to live healthily, the second one will most likely be considered more important.
This is super easy to understand.
Relevance depends on the following ::
- the niche of the domain content that links to the page;
- content of the linked page;
Trust
This is how credible a site is. A credible site is a site Google trusts (ranks high on Google and gets traffic). Backlinks from frequently visited pages usually generate more referral traffic than links from less visited pages. This is obvious.
Power
It is a measure of how powerful your links are. How many links do your links have? For example, a backlink from Wikipedia or The New York Times is considered powerful because these sites have lots of links pointing to them (both external and internal).
Anchor text Optimisation
Anchor text is the backlink text that is visible to humans.
Anchor text affects ranking when it is not properly used. Anchor text shouldn’t always contain only the target keyword you want to rank for but if it must, A good rule to anchor text optimization is always to have a long anchor text mixed with other terms.
If the anchor text looks unnatural, you may face penalties.
How do I Check Backlinks?
There are two options for checking backlinks for a site or an individual page. The first one works only for your websites. The second one can be used to check backlinks to other people’s sites or pages.
Checking Backlinks via Google Search Console
The Google Search Console tool provides you with information about your site’s organic search traffic and overall performance. This is a free tool to use— just submit your site to get started.
After submission, go to the Links tab, which is located in the menu. The number under the”External links” heading indicates the total number of unique backlinks to your site.
Three report forms are listed below:
- Top linked pages (Most frequently linked pages): Pages on your site that have the highest number of links both internal and external.
- Top linking sites (Sites that link most often): Sites with the highest number of backlinks to your site.
- Top linking text (Most common link texts): Anchor phrases that are most often used for links to your site
If you don’t know how to use Google Search Console, start with this tutorial.
Checking With Ahrefs
To check backlinks to a site that doesn’t belong to you, use the free Ahrefs Backlink Checker tool or Moz Backlink checker.
For ahref, the following data will be provided for each link::
- Referring page: page that links to the target page;
- Domain Rating (DR): the rating of the referring site;
- URL Rating (UR): the rating of the referring page;
- Traffic: estimated average monthly organic search traffic per linking page;
- Anchor and backlink: the anchor and text surrounding the link.
The free Backlink Checker tool shows only one backlink per domain.
To find out the five most popular anchor phrases, check out the Top 5 anchors report.
To determine the five pages that lead to the most links, check out the Top 5 pages report.
Note: The Top 5 pages report is generated only if you analyze a domain, not a page.
Frequently Asks Questions (FAQ)
How can I get more backlinks for free?
- Write informative and useful content
- Create a free tool site
- supporting different projects or startups
- Do Charity Works
How do I manually get backlinks?
- Social Media
- Forums
- Q and A sites
- Web 2.0 sites
- Free Image sites
- Profile links
- Web directories
How can I Get Backlinks Naturally?
The best ways to get Backlinks naturally are:
- Write useful content on your site.
- Create free tool sites
What is a Backlink Generator?
A Backlink generator aka Backlink maker is an online tool (software) that is used to create backlinks to a site automatically. All you need to do is add the URL of the site, you want to build a link to. It is not safe to build links automatically, this can lead to Google penalty.
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