Best Practices in Backlinking

For people, they say the greatest form of flattery is imitation. For websites, one of the greatest forms of flattery is backlinking. Unlike internal linking that links one site page to another site page on the same website, a backlink is a link to your website from other websites, ideally credible and relevant websites. Backlinks are incredibly critical to SEO (and can bring in more traffic), as they tell search engines that others believe you are reputable, essentially vouching for you digitally. Search engines take this info into account heavily when it comes to ranking results, which means tactfully acquiring backlinks should be a crucial part of your digital marketing strategy.

Backlinking Basics

Backlinks used to be a spammy content practice until Google’s Panda and Penguin updates. Since then, several tools have been developed to help digital marketers identify high-quality backlink opportunities. For instance, Moz has a tool called Link Explorer that tells you a website’s domain authority (DA). This is a number on a scale from 1 to 100 that gives you an idea of how much value a link will pass on to your website from its domain. They also do this for individual pages through the page authority (PA) score.

The Good vs. The Bad When it Comes to Backlinks

As with many things in life, not all backlinks are created equal. There are backlinks that can benefit your website and some that can hurt it when it comes to search rankings. The credibility and relevancy of the websites linking back to yours determine how search engines will treat yours. 

Editorial links from the most popular publications and websites are considered a gold mine for landing a backlink. These websites are trusted by a huge audience and continuously pump out new content. Backlinks are also very difficult to earn on sites like these, giving another reason why they’re looked at so favorably to search engines when it happens. 

On the other hand, backlinks through paid placements or posted on low-reliability websites come across negatively and can penalize you in rankings. The science behind search engines has gotten so advanced that they can detect when a link was bought. It’s likely the website you bought a link on also sold to others with content deemed not helpful to users. Your link being next to those will basically label you guilty by association and given the same treatment, a docked ranking on result pages. The same fate is imposed when a backlink to your site is on one not relevant or related to your business. Search engines view this as not giving the wanted information a user is seeking and pushes your website further down the ranking list. 

Link Building Strategy Best Practices 

There are a handful of best practices you can follow to earn good backlinks to your site, including being relevant, focusing on quality, guest posting, and getting press.  

• Be relevant: Search engines aim to provide users with the information they need quickly. Keep your content on the topic of what your industry specializes in and present yourself as a go-to thought leader for customers, competitors, and all others interested. 
• Quality over quantity: As previously stated, not all backlinks are created equal. Make a goal to earn high-quality backlinks and stay away from the quick wins of purchasing links that could hurt you.  
• Guest post: To be looked at as a thought leader, offer to guest write a blog or article on a website known for being credible with a big audience. This could turn out to be a win-win situation. Your blog/article can include backlinks to your site and the hosting site gets more content. 
• Get press: If your business has a unique take on a hot topic or an interesting story to tell, send out a press release with the goal of attracting writers to the highly credible publications and trusted media outlets that search engines love. 

Competitor Research: Do you know what backlinks your competitors have? Moz has a tool for that, too. Knowing what backlinks your competition has means you can look into seeing if you can get similar backlinks for your site.

• Follow vs. Nofollow Links: Some websites will link to your site but don’t want to share their website value. When this happens, they had a piece of code to the link “rel: nofollow”. These will not increase your ranking value but can help with brand awareness and general referral traffic.
• Reject spammy links: You can disavow links that you don’t want to be associated with your website in the Google Search Console tool, which will let Google know you do not want that connection.

Measuring Success 

Measuring the success of your backlink strategy can be done by reviewing authority (through Moz or similar tools that platforms like SEMRush or BrightEdge provide), as well as noting changes in organic keyword rankings and organic traffic. To measure success, track the values of the specific URLs you want to target and your domain as a whole. Increases in organic keyword rankings and organic traffic can also be a measure of a successful backlink strategy, as backlinking helps boost SEO. Your links on outside websites could be the reason users are arriving at your site. 

What Does This Mean to You? 

A backlink strategy is a critical component in raising your website’s ranking on search engine result pages. By earning links on websites that are considered good and avoiding links on others, you can see a significant change in how your business is viewed online. Contact TopSpot’s SEO experts for a website audit to discover what backlinks are affecting your website’s ranking.