The internet is a network that consists of many other network. What binds them together is the links that connect each one of them. And because the internet is growing, search engines have used backlinks to get into one place to another, as well as ranking websites based on signals for keyword searches.
What they've been doing for years, have made them able to crawl and index the web as long as they're allowed to.
By owning a website, you're becoming part of the web. And seeking for backlinks is one area that many SEO experts constantly work on. And if want to build quality backlinks to your website and rank higher on search engines, the SEO method should help you.
But just like any other methods you can do to rank higher, you should always be cautious.
If your website has lots of good quality backlinks, good things should happen to your organic traffic. On the other side, bad backlinks will certainly do more harm than good.
Knowing Which Backlinks Are Good And Which Are Bad
In short, good backlinks are those that are coming from authoritative domains.
Good backlinks are those that are coming from websites that have high rank. And because search engines put high emphasis on niche, the more natural and relevant your backlinks are, the better. So always aim for web pages that have similar contents to yours.
While good backlinks come from trusted sources, bad backlinks are those that come from untrusted and unrelated to your website.
Websites that have a bad history or have been penalized somewhere in the past, may give a negative impact to your SEO. While this may not always be the case, but avoiding backlinks from them can save you some headaches.
So always target backlinks that you need, not the ones that you want.
Reviewing Websites. Know If They're Worth Your Links
As the web grows larger, the choices you have increases. Saving yourself some time, below is some steps you can follow so you can quickly determine whether a website is worth your link.
Even if a website has great SEO metrics, it doesn't necessarily mean that it will be good for your link building campaigns. One of the most important things to consider is site relevancy. If a website is not relevant to yours, you might end up building a bad backlink.
Visit the website
Review your targeted websites and their pages. See whether their contents are similar to yours or not. Google uses relevance as a trust signal, so make sure that the website you're analyzing covers the same topic.
When you realize a candidate, the next thing is to see whether or not the website is an active one. You can easily determine if a website is active by looking at the date of their latest posts, or by the number of pages and the information they're giving corresponding to the current time.
If a website has not posted anything new for months, it could be abandoned because of several reasons, including a possible penalty.
Backlinks from websites that are updated often are considered good in quality.
Analyze their traffic
After getting a potential website and know that they're active, the next thing to do is to understand their traffic. You can get insights about this using the many available online tools. Always pay attention to the traffic sources, the number of traffic as well as organic ones.
See for fluctuations.If a site has very unstable search traffic, that can raise suspicious.
Analyze authority and rank
The higher the better. A website's rank can come with many names. From PageRank to Domain Authority. But overall, they're SEO metrics represent how well they are on the web.
If you can get backlinks only from sites with a a good rank, for example, you will score better SEO than having many backlinks but coming from lower ranked websites. However, to get started with link building, you can start low and slowly aim for better ones as your website grow.
One reason to do this is natural link building. Google dislikes unnatural links. So if it sees that your young website has a lot of backlinks coming from highly reputable website, it may think that you're doing blackhat SEO techniques among other strategies.
Seek Dofollow attributes
If you are building backlinks for the purpose of increasing your rank in Google, you have to check if the website is using a rel dofollow attribute. If a nofollow attribute is present, your links will end up as a referreal traffic source only.
While this shouldn't bother you by much if you want to get incoming traffic, but if you aim for Google, you may want more dofollow backlinks that allow the website's rank to flow to your website.
Top-level domain and going local
The domain extension is another factor to consider. Top-level domain or TLD can be one way to determine the audience of a website. For example, .gov are limited to governmental entities and agencies as well as qualifying state, and .edu is limited to specific higher educational institutions.
Try to get backlinks from websites that have similar audiences and have use TLDs.
Another thing to consider is to get backlinks from websites that have the same local extensions as yours. For example, .id are for websites restricted to Indonesian companies (co.id), organisations (or.id), academic (ac.id & sch.id) and citizens (biz.id, my.id & web.id). So if you have a business in Indonesia, for example, links from websites with those extensions can be useful.
Know their audience
A good website is not just limited to how it looks and how it behaves. Its visitors and the audience are the people that made that website active, populated and busy.
To understand the audience of a website, look for the number of comments under posts. If the website is a forum, see how frequent new posts are created and how often they're replied. Also, check how many followers they have on social media and how often their fans are engaging with their posts.
Websites that have a lot of user engagement are great, and they can be a very good opportunity to build high quality backlinks.
Conclusion
If you want to build backlinks, always seek for quality and good backlinks. Create a habit of analyzing each website your are trying to get a link from, before contacting or engaging to them.
Try to make a list of potential websites and observe each one of them. If a site has bad metrics or looks suspicious, move on to the next one. With the internet growing, there are numerous other opportunities to build good backlinks from.
Since backlinks are one of the ways to get good SEO, the secret of a successful strategy is to have backlinks coming from authoritative websites and from the type of sites you would be proud to link to you.
And when it comes to the final words, what you really need to do is to give the best experience for their users. Users are humans, and for that reason, appealing humans is more of a priority. It is true that bad backlinks can do harm while good backlinks will benefit. But a good backlink isn't always about the benefit of a link, but how it's overall value and quality it is able to give you.
Further reading: Backlinks Are Important. But Don't Let Them Bother You Too Much