When is a backlink good and how do I build quality links?

A backlink is a link from an external page to your own domain and is to be understood by the search engine as a “recommendation”. Anyone who takes the trouble to link a text, a picture or other elements must find the page basically good. While the train of thought may well have the right intentions, in 2018 Google is far from any pragmatism about how to rate a website and your link profile. That is precisely why several factors should be considered in link building . In this post, I would like to bring you the factors mentioned a little closer and give an outlook on how to build quality backlinks.

Know your own strengths

Before linkbuilding is actively pursued, first the own link profile should be analyzed. Because only if the actual state has been worked out, you can build on this new measures of off page optimization. Especially for this area, some tools have been developed which, although they have different metrics, are very similar in their core. The biggest differences are here, in my opinion, the prices of each provider.
On the other hand, access to the Google Search Console is essential. Because with her the site operator can already find some backlinks, which can later be imported into the link analysis tool.

f you do not have access to tools to analyze your link profile, I recommend the free add-on LRT Power * Trust – PageRank Replacement browser . This extension provides information about the strength and trustworthiness of your own domain . If you have a budget and would like to take advantage of an analysis tool, there are plenty of alternatives to LinkResearchTools, which offer roughly the same functionality for far less money.

Now to the mentioned values. They are composed as follows:

Strength

• Is composed of the strength and number of your own backlinks
• Can be an indicator of traffic

trustworthiness

• Is composed of the trustworthiness and number of your own backlinks
• domain age
• eg university pages

If the domain has a high degree of trustworthiness, links should be built that increase the strength and vice versa. The values ​​strength and trustworthiness are multiplied together.

When is a backlink good for your own domain?

As already mentioned, a link is always good if it improves its own link profile with regard to the two mentioned values. But restricting yourself to these two values ​​can have fatal consequences. During my links building activities, I’ve seen a lot of sites that seem to be strong and trustworthy, but obviously come from a network. In principle, does the link look like bought or are the domains obviously mirrored and part of a network – Do not touch it! Google punished two well-known link networks in 2014 already.

What else is there to consider?

For pure text links, we distinguish between brand, compound and money keywords:

• Brand: Second Elements ← Name of the company / brand
• Compound: Linkbuilding at Second Elements ← generic keyword and company / brand name
• Money: Linkbuilding ← generic keyword

Again, you should be aware of how the distribution of your text links looks before optimizing the link profile.

Consider outgoing links

The outgoing links of potentially linking pages are also an evaluation criterion. First, you should control how many links there are on the page. A blog z. For example, referring to an external page in almost every post may be considered as spam by Google. In addition, the link page on Bad Neighborhood should be examined. There are also two criteria:

1. Outgoing links (references to gambling / erotic sites)
2. Hosting (located on the same server as gambling / erotic sites)

Outgoing links can be checked with the Screaming Frog tool. But care: Depending on the tool configuration, you can also bring about too many requests that the page is temporarily unavailable.

Looking at subpages granularly

Since September 2016, or since the introduction of the Penguin 4.0 update, Google is assessing the domain in terms of the link profile granularly and in real time. That means in plain language that the actual landing page becomes more relevant in link building. For example , if I want to point out to us at the AdWords / Analytics Workshop , I will not use our homepage as a link target.

Wisdom: NoFollow does not protect against punishment!

For a long time, Google punishment could be avoided by referring to your own page with the NoFollow attribute. This is not the case in reality. In the past, I have seen self-incriminated pages linked exclusively to no-link links in press releases. In principle, the use of the attribute reduces the risk – however, excessive switching of such links can also lead to loss of visibility.

How do I build good backlinks?

From Google’s point of view, the own page should convince with content-related added values, so that links by others come by themselves. The magic word here means added value.From a SEO point of view, this may also be sensible, but it is a bit too simple. Especially with niche sides, it can happen that you can not get past the big players, although they only cut the (sub) theme. Although you can accomplish many things through forum links, here too the admins know very early on and remove pure “SEO links”. Therefore, you should only do link building in forums if the link target offers real added value for the question asked or for the topic. As a company, it is also advisable to link to partner websites in the “Partners” section. According to experience, this encounters little resistance and is also authentic.

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