What Is A High Quality backlink?
If you have found this article then you already know that you need to build backlink trust and authority…. but…. the million dollar question is where do you find good linking opportunities, how do you construct an ideal backlink so it is really powerful and influential over your Google ranking.
How Will A Backlink Help You?
Each backlink counts as a ‘vote’ for or against your site page content. The more good quality links you have, that pass quality and trust signals, the higher you will climb online up Google SERPs.
That’s all well and good, but how do you build a good backlink?
Each backlink that you need has to have certain criteria if you are going to extract the most power from it.
Each backlink needs to be;
- From a Google indexed site
If the page doesn’t appear in Google listings when you search for the URL then Google doesn’t value it….. so don’t build a link from it.
- From within relevant content
If your page is all about air conditioning maintenance then build links from within content that’s all about air conditioning, maintenance, AC problems etc.
- Do Follow, not No Follow
No Follow links don’t pass trust and authority scores to your page so have no impact on your rankings.
While its natural to have a few no follow links within your link profile, don’t waste too much time on no follow links.
- From a Relevant Link Category Page
Page link category is misunderstood. Every page is given a link category depending on the power and authority (and link category) of the most dominant links that point to it.
The page then passes on 60% of that link category score to the pages that it links to. See majesticseo.com to analyse link categories.
If your site doesn’t have a dominant link category – learn more at DeehoSEO backlink categories and relevance – that is relevant to your content then you won’t rank very high in search.
If you analyse any of the sites that rank at the top for the most competitive search terms, you will notice that they all have a relevant, dominant link category.
If you are an estate agency and your link category is “Society / Religeon & Spirituality” instead of “Business / Real Estate” then the bulk of your links are considered by Google not to be relevant and thus are low quality (even if they have good trust scores!).
Google’s thinking behind this is that the most trustworthy sites have relevant categories, and the sites that they recommend are the ones that they are prepared to trust via an algorithm.
- Not from an Orphan page
An orphan page is a page of content that doesn’t have any external links pointing at it.
This means that if you publish an article on a Web 2.0 site, it will be worthless for search ranking purposes until other sites link to it….. & they need to pass an appropriate link category. Understanding how Google choose which sites to rank where is critical to effective SEO. Learn Search Engine Optimisation at seo-trainingcourses.com.
- Naturally Optimized
Don’t spam backlink anchor text. 90% of your anchor text needs to be non targeted Brand name, URL and junk links rather than exact match anchors which need to be 1% or less of your total links.
It is your page content keyword density that passes relevance for specific keywords, not backlink anchor text.
- Trust & Authority Score
Analysis of each potential link page will show you the trust and authority score that it possesses and will pass to you.
Only 60% of this score is passed to you, so the higher the score the more your score will rise.
Sites with higher scores tend to rank better, because they are linked to from quantities of trustworthy sites.
- Organic & Not Paid
Of course many links are paid for rather than being ‘natural’ but they don’t look like they come from paid linking sources and if they look natural and have no connections to link farms, paid platforms or obvious advertising then they count as organic links.
Google will penalise you if you buy links so any page that says “buy a link here” or “advertise here” and passes do follow links is not a good idea for long term rankings.
Even if other sites that have obviously paid links currently rank well, be cautious because those type of links are hazadous & you stand a very good chance of being penalised at any point in time.
How Many Backlinks Do I Need?
The good news is that you probably don’t need as many as you think. Quality is much more important than quantity so focus on building a few great links rather than carpet bombing the internet with large volumes of low quality links.
As as strategy, bulk baclinks is so last year! Think about the quality each link passes and your site will begin to climb online for relevant search terms.
A steady month by month increase in highly trusted links will propel your pages up SERPs.