Backlinks are the backbone of your SEO!!!
What are backlinks?
Backlinks are URL pointers from one website page to another. They act as connectors between two web pages. Basically, when someone clicks a backlink, they are automatically transferred to the new page
Internal links and External Backlinks
When the backlinks point to a page outside the website it is in, they are referred to as ‘external backlinks. But if they point to another page within the same website, they are referred to as internal links.
One could correctly say then that backlinks are the foundation of the internet ecosystem. This is because the internet is basically made up of thousands of independent web pages. These pages are interconnected by backlinks.
Why are Internal links Important?
Internal links are helpful to help navigate a website. They help users to inter-connect related information on your website. They ensure that information does not have to be stored on the same page but rather organized into portfolios or drawers which can easily be accessed from whichever page one is at.
You can then think of internal links as important maps or keys to help navigate one’s website. This ease of navigation helps to keep the user on the website for longer. This is helpful because it informs the Search Engine, e.g. Google, that the user is enjoying or benefiting from being on your site. Hence, this is likely to improve your E.A.T. profile and consequently, more site visits to your website. Thus internal links are directly helpful in helping you to improve organic traffic to your website.
There is also a technical function for these internal links. When a web crawler visits your website, these links help to direct it to the relevant content and also to understand the structure of your website. Crawlers are critical to website indexing and it’s helpful that they spend as much time on your site as possible to better understand the context of your site.
What are external backlinks? And why are they important?
External backlinks are the backbone of navigating the world wide web/ internet and form a very core element of Google’s Rank Algorithm. They are the oil that fuels movement from one website to another. They serve an important functional purpose of connecting inter-related ideas from different sources and hence help to paint the big picture or to provide proof thereof of the stuff being covered in a specific website.
In SEO, External backlinks are very important. When you have many external backlinks pointing to your page, then you can show Google/ or any other search engine that you are good at what you do or claim you are doing. Think of links as citations in a research paper. If more research papers cite you as the authority of their research, then your Authority as seen by Google improves significantly. In fact, your whole EAT profile improves as a result.
In other words, you could say that backlinks are basically ‘votes of confidence by other websites to your website. If this is the case, more votes should be good for you, right?
Not necessarily.
Google also weighs the value of the websites pointing to your site. If you get pointed by one website with a bigger EAT profile, then, you are better off than another website that has 100 links from websites with low EAT profiles.
By now you should be wondering, what is this EAT? In short, means, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness as covered comprehensively in this article.
A) Some backlinks are more equal than others : the case of domain Authority
Yes, that is right. Not all backlinks are created equal. Some backlinks are generally more valuable that others. basically , the all the internet URLs or domains have been assigned a value by Google called domain authority.
Domain authorities are normally ranked between 1 and 100. A site that scores higher is seen as being more authoritative than one that scores very low. Various tools are available to see a site’s domain authority including Moz and Ahref.
Think about it, in Kenya, if you were to read news online, would you trust more if you read it on Nation Media Group website or from a random blogger?
Similarly, Google uses the same thought process. A singular backlink from one high end website is more valuable than 1000 backlinks from low domain websites. It’s not simply about quantity , it’s really about quality.
For your article to be referenced by a highly regarded site, the author from that site must be sure that your article was expertly written. Hence when they reference or link to you, this signals to Google that you are producing quality stuff and hence Google should start sending more traffic to your direction.
This is the reason why you want to ensure that you create very good content that is worth ‘backlinking to’. Such content is original and adds value to the the current global pool of information available in that niche. It’s called in SEO circles as a ‘linkable asset’.
A) Some backlinks are more equal than others : the case of domain Authority
Two websites linking to each other in not uncommon on the internet. Everyone knows that links are important . But these links only make sense if they advance the objective of truly linking two inter-related ideas. This will tend to happen if the two websites have something in common with each other.
Or less, we may find someone trying to be clever to mislead google by simply creating links helter skelter to try cheat their way to a higher Google Rank and get more traffic. This is not only frowned upon by search engines, it is even clearly prohibited. In SEO terms , it is referred to as Black Hat SEO and if discovered can get adverse penalties from Google such as de-indexing your site from the search engine!
Let us say for example that you are a niche site that specialises in tomato farming. Then , links from agricultural related sites or major news sites that cover agricultural stuff will be seen as relevant and hence, if they have higher domain authority, will inject the much needed link juice to your SEO efforts. However, getting a link from a gambling or a digital marketing niche site may confuse the search engine. Of course , with improving AI, Google’s algorithms are becoming more clever to try to as much as possible understand how relevant a backlink is to your site.- especially since , Google also understands , there is a level in which you cannot really help who backlinks to your site. ( there is disavowing links) but that is a technical discussion we shall cover later.
C) The more backlinks from the same website, the diminishing value of link juice ( backlink law of diminishing returns) - with a hidden positive !
While an additional link from the same website that linked you yesterday is good , a new link from a totally new website that has never linked to you before is even better. There is a good reason for this. There are over 1.7 billion websites available in the world as at the time of writing this in mid 2022, and this number is poised to grow even further. If therefore you write quality content, there is no way you are not going to get lots of websites happy to link their information from your website.
Of course, additional links from the same website are still helpful but in terms of weight, they carry a diminishing level of return. That is, every additional link , carries less link juice that it’s predecessor.
For this case , getting 5 links from 5 different High DA websites might be more helpful than getting 50 links from 1 high DA website.
It’s not all doom though. There is a hidden positive to having more links from websites too, for as long as this occurs naturally. ( yes there is an unnatural – black hat way of getting links).
Additional links from news sites create the impression, probably rightfully , that you are a big brand that is discussed a lot. Being a bid brand is helpful in pushing your SEO efforts since it greatly helps in page rank. This is where backlinks and mentions ( non follow) are actually very key in creating your brand profile.
D) Do-Follow links help more in 'link juice' than no follow links.- What are dofollow and no follow links anyway?
A do-follow link is permission that allows search engines crawlers ( preferably Google) to point back to your website. For example, assuming you came to my website 360digital.com and found this article about backlinks. Within this article , I have linked out to other websites that I am keen for you to visit and will help advance my discussion. As a result, or as a thank you to those sites, I am happy for Google to know that I highly regard those sites and thus google can attribute a high EAT weighting and improve their domain authority.
Now below this article, I may decide to open up my ‘comments section’ and you are free to come and share your views and feedback about this article. You may , in those comments , decide , instead of giving genuine feedback, you use it to market your product or your website and hence you go ahead and post your link in my website. Now , your website could be of very low DA and thus may hurt my SEO efforts ( If good websites pointing to my site means I am a good site, equivalently, a lot of bad sites pointing to my site communicate the exact reverse message).
Hence I could decide the links I personally placed in the article have a dofollow attribute and those that are placed in the comments by readers get a nofollow attribute.
A nofollow link therefore is a prohibition for Google not to view that link on my site to point to my site and count as part of my link profile. It is a useful pointer that helps to fight ‘blackhat SEO’ practices.
On a technical level, the sites that would have a nofollow attribute have this specific HTML tag inserted in the relevant section :
<a href=”https://www.nameofthesite.com/” rel=”nofollow”> Link Text </a>.
Such a tag is useful at pointing to Google not to bother giving link juice consideration to any link posted there.
d/i) Why is a Dofollow and Nofollow link strategy helpful ?
As prior mentioned, having a nofollow link strategy in your content creation is important when you open up the page to the public to offer comments and you just don’t have the capacity to moderate all comments effectively.
But a nofollow link can equally apply when you are the one placing the links and are forced to mention probably your competition and are not keen to give them unnecessary link juice leverage.
Of course, there are times, even when posting your competition, it may be helpful to add do follow links- especially in cases where such addition appears natural. Google prefers articles that are naturally primed to help the users than those that are specifically created with Search Engines in mind.
User intent and satisfaction is King!
E) This is technical but key- you must have your target keyword appearing in the Backlink's anchor text to score more link juice
e/i) What is anchor text?
These are the visible characters that hypertexts ( the words that make active part of the clickable link) will display when linking to another website. Normally it has a different colour from the rest of the text ( sky blue) for most , but can be changed on the html code .
e/ii) What is target keyword?
These are the group of words that users use in Google when searching for a certain solution/ service/article/ information that may be related to your website.
e/iii) Target keyword appearing in backlink anchor text
So assuming a user is searching for information regarding backlinks and how they help in SEO. Assuming several websites have mentioned this website , and this particular article when giving their reades more information about backlinks. If in their linking they use the word backlink on the hypertext , and a user went to google and searched for the words what are backlinks , my site page would rank higher because both the anchor texts and the target keywords match.