What Are Website Backlinks And Why There Important For SEO?
Simply put, backlinks are inbound links to a website.
In basic link building, the goal is to have other websites link to yours. This pointing of links to your website from other websites is what we call a “backlink.”
The more backlinks that point to your website, the better. However, it’s not just the quantity of backlinks that’s important – it’s also the quality.
A backlink from a high-quality website will be much more valuable than a backlink from a low-quality website. That’s because a backlink from a high-quality website signals to search engines that your website is also highly reputable and will tend to have more authority and trust compared to other sites with lower quality backlinks.
Why Are Backlinks Important?
Backlinks are important part in your search engine optimization strategy.
Search engines revisit pages more frequently than unpopular ones, they might discover your content faster if it has links from popular pages.
To use an analogy, think of backlinks as votes to your website.
The more votes you have to your website in your backlink profile that either vouch or endorse your content, the more likely search engines such as Google will show your link to individuals looking for your content to answer a particular question.
Backlinks Boost Your Trustworthiness and Credibility
If you want to build trust and credibility with your audience, one of the best things you can do is to focus on building backlinks.
There are many benefits to building backlinks, but perhaps the most important is that it helps to build trust and credibility with your audience. When someone links to your site, it’s a signal that they find your content valuable and trustworthy.
Of course, not all backlinks are created equal. A link from a high-quality, authoritative site will do more to boost your trustworthiness than a link from a low-quality site.
Types of Backlinks
There are two different types of backlinks and their importance can vary from one website to another. However, understanding the different types of backlinks is essential for all website owners and managers.
As mentioned earlier, backlinks are basically incoming links that lead from one website to another. They are important because they help improve a website’s search engine ranking. The more backlinks a website has, the higher it will rank in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
There are two main types of backlinks:
1. Do-Follow Backlinks
2. No-Follow Backlinks
Let’s breakdown the difference between do-follow vs. no-follow backlinks to get a better understanding of the role each one plays and why it’s important to have a good combination of both in your content marketing and search engine optimization strategy.
Do-Follow Backlinks
When it comes to building backlinks to your website, it’s important to focus on quality over quantity. That’s why it’s important to seek out do-follow backlinks from high-quality websites.
Do-follow backlinks are links that pass along link juice (the passing of domain authoritativeness) from one website to another are the most valuable type of backlink. They tell the search engines to follow the link and consider it when calculating the relevancy of the content that the link points to.
Link juice is important because it helps your website rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). The more link juice you have, the better your chances of ranking for your target keywords.
But what’s important to keep in mind when building do-follow backlinks to your content is that the backlink pointing back to your content makes sense and is relevant to your niche.
You’d be surprised to learn how many websites online have amazing content, but are currently not ranking in the search engines.
This is because bloggers and content marketers, when conducting link building strategies, don’t take the time to research their competitors to determine the best sites to reach out to when requesting a link from other relevant sites.
Most will just be happy to receive any link, no matter the domain authority (DA) or page authority (PA) (which I’ll get into in a moment).
You have to take the time to ensure your link building efforts count when trying to get your content to rank on the search engines and build traffic to your content.
To find do-follow high-quality backlinks, start by looking for websites in your niche that offer high-quality, relevant content that’s best suited to your content to help Google better understand the co-relation between the two.
No-Follow Backlinks
A no-follow backlink is a link that does not pass on “link juice” to the linked-to website. In other words, nofollow links do not help improve the linked-to website’s search engine rankings.
So why would anyone want to create a no-follow backlink?
There are a couple reasons:
1. To avoid being accused of participating in link schemes.
If all the links on your website are do-follow, Google could penalize your website if it determines that you’re participating in a link scheme. So, by having some no-follow links, you make your link profile look more natural.
2. Also, when it comes to your link building strategies, having a good mix of do-follow links and no-follows links looks more natural to Google when crawling your content.
Although utilizing no-follow links doesn’t pass link juice to your content, they help to provide an even distribution among your citation flow and trust flow.
Citation and Trust Flow For Website Backlinks in SEO
Citation Flow
If you want to be listed in the top 10 results for a specific keyword then you need to make sure that you have the right kind of links pointing for your citation flow.
Citation Flow is a metric used by search engine optimization (SEO) professionals to determine the popularity and influence of a website.
Citation flow is based on the number of links pointing to a website. A high citation flow indicates that a website is popular and has a lot of influence.
A low citation flow indicates that a website is not as popular or influential.
So citation flow takes into account the quantity of backlinks that are referring to your site or content. This lets the search engines know that your content is getting a lot of referral traffic from other similar sites.
Trust Flow
Trust flow is a metric used by SEOs to determine the quality of a website. A high trust flow score indicates that the site is trusted by other websites, while a low trust flow score indicates that the site is not as trusted.
There are a number of factors that can influence a website’s trust flow score, including the number of inbound links, the quality of those links, and the age of the website.
Trust flow is an important metric to keep an eye on, as it can be a good indicator of the overall quality of a website. A high trust flow score can be a good sign that a website is worth linking to, while a low trust flow score can be a red flag.
In essence, do-follow links helps search engines understand the trust flow of your content based on other high authority websites that refer to your content.
On the flip-side, those websites, at one point of time had no trust flow and needed back-links to them in-order for their trust flow and ranking to increase in the search engines.
So getting a large quantity of quality back-links becomes the main focus of most bloggers and content makers online looking to increase their organic traffic through the SERPs.
Other Forms of Website Backlinks For SEO
Sponsored or Paid Links
You may sometimes pay an affiliate or an influential person to promote a piece of content or to write a review of one of our products.
If money, a product or service, or any kind of consideration changes hands in return for a mention, we want to let you know.
Google has created a special tag called “rel=”sponsored” which tells Google not to penalize your site for having these mentions.
This form of link is fairly new in the search engine optimization field and helps Google to basically ignore these links, much like no-follow links.
User Generated Content Links (UGC Links)
User generated content links are links that link to your content that you’ve generated. This can be in the form of a blog post, article, or even just a mention on social media.
Although, these are considered relevant backlinks, unfortunately Google doesn’t weigh these links as heavy as they did say eight years ago.
But UGC backlinks can still help in your overall citation flow which Google does take into consideration.
Not only that, but these types of links could help in getting more traffic to your content, even if the search engines aren’t considering these heavily to help push you up the results pages.
Generating user generated content links can be a difficult task, but there are a few methods you can use to increase the amount of links pointing to your website.
Anchor Texts
Google has long been known to be the leading search engine in the world. They are constantly changing and updating their algorithms to ensure that they are providing the best possible results to their users. A recent change that they have made is to their anchor text algorithm.
Anchor text is the text that is used to link to another piece of content. It is usually in the form of a word or phrase, and it is often the most important factor in determining whether or not a piece of content will rank well in search results.
Google has announced that they will now be taking into account the anchor text of a piece of content when determining its rank. This means that if you have a referring piece of content with a lot of highly relevant anchor texts pointing to your content, this helps Google to understand your topic and pushes you up the SERPs.
Toxic Links (Unnatural Links)
Toxic backlinks are links from low-quality or suspect websites that are not marked with nofollow or a sponsored attribute.
These links may be paid links, links from low-quality directories, or links from bookmarks or other sites that don’t use the nofollow attribute. They may also include links that use exact match anchors.
One form of toxic links, if not used correctly, are the use of PBNs or Private Blog Networks.
These are a network of privately owned blogs that have been generated for the sole purpose of building authority to them and then creating backlinks on them to point to your “money site” or main content that you’re trying to rank.
Be careful of using paid SEO services from places like Fiverr and SEOClerks as most of these services provide toxic links that will kill or drastically reduce your rankings in the search engines.
One way to identify if you have these types of backlinks pointing to your content is to utilize the backlink audit tool to review and identify toxic links.
If you should find any of these types of backlinks pointing to your content, one of the best ways to resolve this issue to use the Google Disavow tool.
**Disavow List:** The Disavow List feature allows you to submit URLs that are found in your site’s code but which have been identified as spammy by Google’s algorithms. This will help prevent those sites from decreasing your rankings on the search engines.
Editorially Placed Links
Editorial backlinks are a bit different than your typical backlink.
These are links that are editorially given by the website owner, rather than being paid for or reciprocal. In other words, the website owner is vouching for your website by linking to it.
Editorial backlinks are powerful because they show that you have a high-quality website that is worthy of being linked to.
These types of backlinks are considered “natural backlinks” as the way Google intends for you to earn your backlinks, but are often hard to come by in this day and age of search engine optimization.
But the best way to get these types of natural backlinks is to provide genuine, unrepeatable content that others can’t replicate on their sites.
You have to think “outside the box” for your content to obtain these types of links, but can be done.
Conclusion
In conclusion, backlinks are important for SEO because they are a ranking factor that Google takes into account when determining where to rank a piece of valuable content in its search results.
A backlink is essentially a vote of confidence from one website to another, and the more backlinks a piece of content has, the more likely it is to rank highly in Google’s search results.
However, it’s important to note that not all backlinks are created equal; a backlink from a high-quality website carries more weight than a backlink from a low-quality website.
Additionally, it’s important to build backlinks gradually and naturally; if you try to game the system by buying or building hundreds of backlinks overnight, you will likely be penalized by Google.
So, I hoped this article helped you better understand what website backlinks are for seo and some link building strategies that need to build these links.
