You can’t afford to disregard the importance of a well-thought-out plan to generate backlinks, as they continue to be one of Google’s top three ranking factors. In truth, you won’t rank well for competitive keywords and search terms if you don’t develop high-quality links.
It’s not fair to compare all of the links. In fact, having poor quality links pointing to your site might hurt its search engine rankings, which will in turn reduce its share of organic traffic and, ultimately, its revenue.
The best way to improve your site’s performance is to analyze your backlinks and your competitors’ backlinks on a regular basis. This will help you find new opportunities to build links that will boost your organic visibility.
Why Should You Perform a Backlink Analysis as Part of Your Search Engine Optimization Efforts?
You should begin reviewing your backlink profile on a regular basis if you aren’t already doing so. Your ability to exploit what you learn about your own and your rivals’ link profiles to your advantage grows with the depth of your knowledge.
Locate Weak Spots in the Competition’s Linkage
You can learn about the link gap between you and your top competitors by performing a backlink study. By comparing your own link profile to that of your competitors, you may gauge how challenging it will be to get higher search engine rankings. As a result, you may devise a plan to reduce the link deficit and strengthen your position in the market.
You can’t expect to beat the competition if you don’t know the link profiles of their sites.
Discover Malicious Backlinks and Take Preventative Measures to Safeguard Search Engine Rankings
If you’re worried about your site’s organic performance being harmed by what are known as bad links (also called toxic links, spammy links, or unnatural links), a backlink audit is the best way to proactively find these issues and areas of concern and take action to protect your rankings.
If your site has suffered a drop in rankings due to faulty links, you’ll need to conduct an investigation to determine what went wrong and how to correct it.
A backlink analysis, in the simplest terms, is like getting an annual physical or an annual MOT for your automobile; by performing these regularly, you may catch and correct possible problems before they become major headaches.
When Is a Backlink Not a Backlink?
High-quality inbound links emanate from reliable resources and do not seek to artificially influence page ranks. The best place to go for an explanation of how things should appear is in Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.
To persuade other sites to connect to you with high-quality, relevant links, Google recommends making content that will organically go viral on the Internet. The value of producing high-quality material is clear: When someone else finds your work helpful for their readers, they will likely link to it. This is because links are typically editorial votes given by choice.
What, exactly, does a high-quality link look like in practice?
A high-quality link is not just put editorially but also…
be capable of bringing in new customers by word of mouth. If there is a probability or potential to acquire targeted referral traffic, you should want a link even if Google didn’t exist. Don’t forget that links’ primary function is to help users find their way across the web; if a link has the potential to send high-quality visitors to your site, it’s probably a good one.
Fits in well with the theme of your own site. Links between completely unrelated content are one of the most jarring features of the internet. High-quality backlinks tend to originate from sites that provide related content to your own.
originated with a reliable source. When one website recommends another, they are effectively casting a vote of confidence in the recommended site by linking to it. To put it another way, you are more likely to follow the advice of a friend than a total stranger, and this logic can be applied to backlinks. In the long run, a link from a reputable source like the New York Times is more valuable than one from a blog that nobody has heard of, especially one that lacks a coherent topical focus and consistently produces subpar work.
A “Toxic” Backlink
If a quality backlink is defined as one that has been editorially earned, comes from a reliable source, and has the ability to provide referral traffic, then what is a toxic backlink?
Link schemes that manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results are against Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and will be penalized accordingly. This includes any action taken that changes the destination of a link from your site or the destination of a link on your site.
Community-Only Blogs
Building and maintaining a network of blogs whose sole aim is to put in connections to other sites is known as a private blog network (PBN) and is considered a black hat link building technique.
Many unsavory webmasters think that Google would never find a completely hidden blog network. While many of these may appear natural to the average online user, the problem is that they are easily spotted by professional SEOs and, by extension, Google.