Backlink FAQs: What Are Backlinks And Why Are They Important?

Backlinks are still a huge ranking factor, just as much as they were 9 or 10 years ago. The only difference is the way they are now approached. Gone are the days of spammy tactics, instead brands are now opting for a more meaningful approach.

The subject of links can be a confusing and complicated issue, but we have created this blog to make the ‘dark arts’ of SEO easier to digest.

What Are Backlinks?

A backlink is an incoming link to a webpage from another website. If a website links to your website – this is known as a backlink.

Why Are Backlinks Important For Your Website?

The important thing to remember about backlinks is that they pass link equity/authority from one website to yours. This particularly helps to build up the authority of your web page and website. In turn, this helps search engines to understand the importance of your website and indexes your website pages accordingly.

Companies who engage in blogging receive 97% more backlinks to their site.

Hubspot

Can I Get Any Backlink?

Yes, however it is more important to get the right links to your website. You need to analyse data to find the best opportunities for your website.

You should aim to gain backlinks from websites that have the following:

• Are relevant to your website e.g. the same industry
• Have a good domain authority score
• Come from a website that is not spammy

What are Follow and No Follow Backlinks?

Each link on a website is by default a ‘follow’ link; this essentially means that authority is allowed to be passed on to the website that it is linking to.

However, some websites set the status of their links to ‘no follow’ to prevent sharing their website authority with others.

Are Backlinks a Ranking Factor?

The answer is yes! They give search engines a strong signal of how good your website is in terms of quality and relevance.

What is a Backlink Profile?

A backlink profile is a portfolio of all the links to your website and can be put together for you by your online marketing agency.

The backlink profile will provide the following:

• Give you good insights into what websites link to your website.
• Allow you to find any spammy links from low-quality websites that you want to disavow using Google’s free disavow tool.
• Allow you to find new avenues that bring a lot of traffic to your website that you may be able to maximise exposure on.

The #1 ranking page in the search results gets an additional 5%-14.5% more dofollow backlinks from new websites each month.

Ahrefs

What is the Penguin Algorithm?

The Penguin algorithm is one of Google’s search algorithms that help the search engine filter out website results that engaged in manipulative linking schemes.

Released back in 2012, Penguin has gone through multiple updates and improvements before finally becoming part of Google’s Core Algorithm in 2017.

How Do I Get A Backlink To My Website?

The majority of backlinks will naturally occur over time, but this doesn’t mean you can’t go and get them for yourselves.

The following are the most common methods of gaining backlinks:

• Through guest posts on relevant websites.
• The broken links strategy.
• Via the creation of infographics.
• Outreach to influencers.

Those are some of the most common questions that we get asked by our clients. We hope they help.

To learn more about creating and putting a backlink strategy in place, get in touch using the form below.