Last week, we published Part 9 of our complete guide to Google Ranking Factors.
We focused on outbound links and how and why they affect your site’s ranking.
This week we will be working on backlinks.
What is a backlink?
A backlink is a link from a third party website back to your website.
These are also called “inbound” or “coming” links.
Why Backlinks Matter
Earlier this year, Andrey Lipattsev, Senior Search Quality Strategist at Google Ireland, revealed that links to your website are one of Google’s top three ranking factors.
A backlink is a vote of confidence that someone other than your own web property trusts your content and believes it to be of value. Google weighs each of these links and assigns a unique value to his linked web page.
What does Google look for in backlinks?
1) The number of individual referring domains linking to your website or webpage is a very important factor in Google’s algorithm.
2) The permissions of the websites or web pages that link to your site are also important. A few high-authority links are much more valuable than a large number of links from low-quality sites.
This is from our own guide to the official website.
An authority website is a trustworthy site. Trusted by users, industry professionals, other of his websites and search engines.
The more quality links you have, the better.
3) An authority website doesn’t necessarily have to be one of the regular big publishers. A niche website or blog that offers high-quality, relevant content can be just as appreciated as any other source.
Four) Backlinks from your old website may be more valuable than links from your new site.
Five) Backlinks from sites related to your niche are much more valuable than backlinks from unrelated sites or webpages. Some people believe that there is
6) Links from low-quality sites have little impact on your visibility. If your site practices black hat SEO (linking schemes, spam, doorway pages), it can negatively affect your rankings .
7) A link in the body of a web page is more valuable than a link in another plugin or widget elsewhere on the page.
8) If a site links to you using a “nofollow” meta tag, that site’s permissions are not passed to you. Some publishers automatically nofollow all external links, which is bad practice. Nofollow links should be reserved for sponsored or paid links or content you don’t necessarily trust but want to use as an example.
9) Links from various websites are good, but many links to your site from a single domain (especially if it’s one of the sites linking to you) is considered spam There is a possibility.
Ten) Despite our previous assumptions, links from 301-redirected pages should not lose PageRank compared to links from non-301-redirected pages.
11) Anchor text can affect how Google weights links to your site. If you link to your homepage and refer to your brand, the anchor text should only include the website or brand name. We want to avoid links to more descriptive homepages like ‘Local SEO Guru’ as they can be considered manipulative.
12) Anchor text to specific web pages on your site should be as descriptive (but concise) as possible in order to benefit from the link.
13) Links at the top of the page have more weight than links below them.
14) Links from long-form evergreen content (1,000 word+ articles that have been popular for a long time) are more valuable than short news-based posts.
15) Top-level domains aren’t always considered a factor, but some believe that getting links from .edu or .gov domains is more important than others. This may be because these types of websites have high privileges anyway.
For more chapters of the Google Ranking Factors series, please see below.
Part 9: outbound link
Part 8: internal link
Part 7: Site-level signal
Part 6: We trust signals, authority and expertise.
Part 5: Overlapping content and syndication.
Part 4: Content freshness.
Part 3: quality content.
part 2: Keyword relevance, frequency, and Latent Semantic Index (LSI).
Part 1: On-page signals such as title tags, H1 tags, and meta descriptions.
