Backlinks are the links pointing to a website (Domain) from an external website (Other domain). Backlinks are also referred as “Inbound links” or “Incoming links”.
Why are backlinks important search engine ranking factor
Backlinks are not the sole factor to rank your website on search engines. But it’s impact on ranking is very high if you get relevant and high quality inbound links to your website. Every link pointing to a site shows solidarity towards the linked website. If a web page links to your website, it’s a vote of confidence towards the content of your webpage. Through the backlinks profile search engine tries to understand how unique, popular, engaging and useful your content is to the audience.
Google uses PageRank to rank your website urls in SERP (search engine results page). PageRank is an algorithm which takes into account the number and the quality of links to your web page. It has been observed that web pages with higher page rank tend to rank high on search engine results. A backlink from a website passes it’s link juice (pagerank) to the the linked website. This makes backlinks an important factor to improve your pagerank and rank higher. Read more about pagerank on Wikipedia.
What kind of backlinks should a web page have
A web page should have high quality and relevant external links. It is recommend to have quality over quantity when it comes to inbound links. The kind of web pages linking to your website defines the quality of your backlink. Collection of all your inbound links creates your domain’s backlink profile.
So, what is a quality backlink?
The backlinks generated naturally through popularity and usefulness of the content are the best ones. As they are endorsed by an external domain only if they found your content unique, useful and engaging. A link to your website from an authoritative website is considered a quality backlink. A link from Wikipedia, a famous news agency, .edu or .gov domains are considered high quality as the trust rank of such domains is very high. It’s recommended and always useful to have backlinks from a website which has similar or related content to yours.
Examples of relevant quality backlinks.
Example 1: A hotel’s website gets a backlink from a prominent travel blog is a useful and relevant link. As the audience for both the websites are related. The link will become more relevant if the travel blog writes about the same geographical location where the hotel is located.
Example 2: An ecommerce website selling baby products which includes prams and strollers. Another parenting blog references some of the stroller / prams from the ecommerce website which are good to buy, this is a quality backlink for ecommerce website as the niche for both the websites is similar.
How to get quality backlinks.
The best or I should say the only way to get high quality links from other website to yours is “Create good content”. Good content is something which is useful, relevant and engaging. The content should help readers find what they are looking for. A useful content will increase your chances of getting referenced by other websites, as they might find your content useful for their audience.
What should a useful content have to increase the chances getting a backlink.
- Content should have solutions or answers to the readers problems or questions
- The content should be in depth and well researched
- It should be engaging
- Website’s User interface and experience should be appealing and engaging
- The webpage should load fast
- Site should be responsive and work well on all devices
If you have the above points covered, chances are high that other websites will link to your content. As it adds value for their readers.
What should you avoid while building backlinks
While gaining backlinks one should avoid any practice which is against the webmaster guidelines. Typically one should avoid the following:
- Purchase or sell backlinks which pass pagerank (when advertising on websites the linking <a> tags should have “rel=nofollow” attribute. This will not pass pagerank and will not be penalized.)
- Excessive link exchange (reciprocal links)
- Guest posting with optimised anchor links
- Link farming through large scale directory submissions
- Comments on other websites / forums with optimized hyperlinks in signature
Read more about google’s link schemes here.
Conclusion
Backlinks are important to rank a website but that’s not the only way. Google’s algorithm is complex and it takes into consideration hundreds of factors to decide which webpage should rank on a search query. Good content does not have a substitute, it pays if you really write a piece of content which is useful. Backlinks should be volunteer and natural. A good content always has a higher chance to be linked by other webpages.
If you liked the article and found it useful, I would request you to link this. Let’s make internet a fair playground where the useful and better content wins.
Very knowledgeable and the most valuable article. The way you write is simply awesome. thank you so much for this useful info.