Brief History of how the term Backlinks Originated:
Do you know how the term backlink originated and the importance of backlinks increased in SEO? Initially, Many Search Engines were dependent on keywords included in the content to decide and provide the results to the user for a search query in SERP.
This led to a lot of unwanted results occupying the first page of results with some black hat SEO techniques like keyword stuffing, irrelevant content, etc.
After a couple of years, Google realized that what other people say about your brand or product or services on other external websites is more reliable than what you say about yourself and your brand on your site.
To implement this basic idea, they have introduced backlinks. Google can acknowledge what other users on other external sites are thinking of your brand by viewing at the backlinks that pointed to your site. Google could see what users thought about your brand by looking at the links that pointed to your pages from external sites.
Apart from backlinks, Google Search Engine has added over 200 other factors to its search engine algorithm to identify spam and provide the best possible and relevant search results for a user’s query.
Some of the most crucial website ranking factors are social media signals, website speed, website architecture, domain name age, content quality, internal links, quality backlinks, and many more.
Backlinks are still the fundamental part of the search engine algorithm and will always be an essential factor in ranking well in search engine rankings.
In this article, we will discuss backlink types and the importance of backlinks in SEO.
What is a Backlink?
A link pointing from an external site to your website is called a backlink. Google has also introduced different backlink types that determine how search engines look at a link pointing to your site from an external site.
Why are Backlinks Important?
Links are one of the crucial factors which affect Google’s ranking. The more quality incoming links you have, the better your ranking in search engine results will be. Many webmasters and bloggers are trying to earn backlinks with the DoFollow attribute to their sites since this type of backlinks can improve your site’s ranking in Google, Yahoo, Bing, and other search engines. Below are some of the advantages of creating backlinks to your site.
- Increase your reliability and credibility
- Help you increase your rankings
- Drive referral traffic to your page
- Help Search Engines to find new pages
- To build relationships between websites
- Backlinks naturally attract more backlinks
- Gain authority within your niche
- To draw new customers and improve the conversion rates
What are the Types of Backlinks?
When it comes to SEO, there are mainly two types of backlinks that help search engines decide whether to link is valuable or not? They are:
- DoFollow Backlink
- NoFollow Backlink
The person reading a blog or webpage may not know the difference between a Nofollow and Dofollow backlink. A Specific attribute called rel=” nofollow” and rel=” dofollow” attached to the anchor tag in the source code determines the effect of that backlink on your site performance in SERPs.
For External links on your site, you can use some of the “rel” attribute values provided by Google in the tag to tell search engines about the relationship between your site and the outbound link (external link).
DoFollow Backlinks
DoFollow Backlink is considered a valuable link in SEO and indicates search engines to follow a link. This type of link is regarded as a “vote of trust” and allows search engines to pass some link juice (trust and authority) from the linked site to the external site it is pointing to.
DoFollow link Indicates to search engines the content on the other end of this link is valuable and trusted.
For Example, this backlink is a do-follow backlink given to the Online Price Comparison Site. The source code of this link looks like this:
<a href="https://onlinepricecomparison.in/" rel="nofollow">Online Price Comparison</a>For regular do-follow links, you don’t need to add a rel attribute, as shown in the above Example
<a href="https://onlinepricecomparison.in/" rel="dofollow">Online Price Comparison</a>NoFollow Backlinks
Web admins use nofollow links to tell search engines to ignore a particular link and not pass any authority to the linked page.
The Google algorithm mostly ignores noFollow links, and they are rarely valuable to SEO.
A website should have a good mix of both do-follow and nofollow backlinks for a healthy link profile.
Factors that influence the quality of a backlink
To make a successful link-building strategy. Getting backlinks from an external site is not just enough to get the desired SEO results. It is important that you need to do proper research on an external site from which you are trying to earn a link. Many other factors influence the quality of backlinks. So it is necessary that you need to check specific parameters before posting to get a quality backlink.
One high-quality do-follow backlink from a high-authoritative site is very beneficial for the SEO of a site than getting 20-30 low-quality backlinks from low-authority sites.
Below are some of the factors you need to look on an external site or blog before publishing content on a site.
Domain Authority
Build backlinks on high-authority sites that have Domain authority or site authority greater than yours.
Website credibility
Choose sites with low spam scores and with secure HTTPS:// protocol.
Content relevance – Try to gain backlinks from relevant sites or sites that promote sites or content relevant to yours to avoid being considered spam by Google.
Do-Follow and No-Follow links
Make sure you have a well-mixed proportion of dofollow and nofollow links for a healthy line profile.
Anchor text
The anchor text you use in the text should define the relationship between the content and relevancy between the sites. Always try to add hyperlinks to primary keywords, secondary keywords, synonyms, and LSI keywords of a page pointing to.
Link Placement
Getting links from the content (contextual links) is more valuable than getting links from widgets and footers.
Number of linking domains
A backlink listed among many other backlinks on a single webpage is not valuable as it reduces the link equity to be passed to your site, and it also becomes difficult for a user to go through the content and your link.
How Backlinks are Gained?
Backlinks are earned through 3 different methods. They are:
Naturally links (Recommended):
It is a process of getting links organically to your site by creating high-quality content in the form of text, images, and infographics that is highly useful for users. This method naturally makes other site owners link to you if they believe the content on your site is also helping their blog readers too.
For Example: If you are an SEO blogger and you want to write an article about your favorite SEO blogs provide links to their blogs. These links are naturally gained links.
Manually Built links:
Get links to your site manually by doing some link-building activities. Approaching a blog owner or influencer similar to your niche with an intention to provide quality content to be posted on his blog and in return ask for a link to your site.
Self-created links:
Manually add your site link in forums, blog comment sections, or online directories. This is an easy way to get backlinks, but it is not a recommended method as search engines consider this kind of link-building tactic as a black hat SEO strategy and may penalize your site.
