Countless professional bloggers aren’t really aware of what backlinks are! They often talk about them and they might even brag about how many their particular site has. However, these self-proclaimed pundits often aren’t all that sure about how search engines really operate.
Unfortunately, this means that the industry has ended up with a ton of bad advice floating around online. Backlinks are conceptually simple, but we found it hard to find someone who had a quick succinct definition of what they are.
As a result, we asked the experts at BackLink Patrol and got our answer.
Defining the Word Backlink Simply
A backlink is nothing more than a hyperlink to your site from an outside source. Any single link from an external site counts as a backlink. While that might seem simple enough, search engines like Bing, Google and all of the other popular brands divvy these links up based on whether they consider them good or not.
Good backlinks come from authority sites, natural posts and other places that link to your site’s content organically. For instance, say you were lucky enough to have your blog quoted by a news source that uses a .org top-level domain.
Search engine algorithms will consider that to be a particularly high-quality link and it could help your site’s content appreciate in the rankings, especially if the link itself is directly related to the content that you’ve posted. Keep in mind that search engines follow every link that they come across, which means more backlinks translate into additional search crawls.
Don’t get carried away with trying to get people to link to you, though, because search engines do rate many links as bad.
Bad Backlinks and So-called Black Hat SEO
Some unscrupulous types have partnered with other like-minded individuals to spread links together all over the web. Many of these groups do so automatically, which makes most search engines consider their activities to be a little better than spam. In a worst-case scenario, you could end up with links from a low-quality site and get pegged as a spammer even though you’re not.
Bad backlinks come from a variety of sources. Scrapers and other bots sometimes go haywire and start reproducing content they get from anywhere. Domain name problems are even more common, however.
When a domain name gets bought by someone other than it’s previous owner, the new cyber-inhabitant might be inheriting a whole mess of bad backlinks coming into their site. You’ll need to get rid of as many of these as possible so your site doesn’t drop lower and lower into the rankings over time.
Eliminating Low-quality Links from Your Search Portfolio
In the last few years, there’s been a great deal of debate over whether link code that instructs a search engine to follow a link or not influences your rankings. Generally, the hyperlink code that includes the dofollow command will tell Google and Bing’s bots to follow the link and see where it goes. Increasingly, however, both of these seem to be ignoring these commands.
This kind of back and forth discussion makes it hard to figure out exactly what you should be doing in order to ensure that your site consistently ranks high on all of the search engines you’re aiming for.
Contact us today and tell our experienced team all about your current situation. They’ll leverage years of expertise to make sure that you get the kind of incoming links your business or blog needs.