Truth about backlinks and SEO

You need backlinks to create a decent domain ranking. True or not true? True.

What are backlinks? The truth about backlinks and SEO!

Backlinks are hyperlinks found on other websites that direct users to a page on your site or your client’s site. These links are also known as inbound links or incoming links. It’s important to keep in mind that from the viewpoint of the websites that link to you or any other site, these are considered external, outbound, or outgoing links. Thus, the terminology varies based on perspective, but ultimately, the links serve the same purpose, whether they are incoming or outgoing.

How big is the influence of backlinks or your SEO?

Backlinks serve multiple important functions

1. Backlinks ensure that visitors from other websites with a related topic eventually find you.
2. Backlinks help search engines like Google understand that your website and the site that linked to you are related, allowing them to show visitors better search results.
3. Backlinks show search engines that your website has a certain authority in a specific field. This is largely responsible for the domain ranking a search engine assigns to your website.

The quality of backlinks significantly impacts the domain’s ranking

It’s perfectly logical. If crappy backlinks (even from self-created websites) could get a website a top ranking, all sites would be at the top of the search results… Fortunately, that’s not the case.

Backlinks from websites with low domain rankings

Collecting hundreds or even thousands of backlinks from websites with low domain rankings, has very little value for search engines.

Toxic backlinks: some backlinks can be considered ‘toxic’. That means they are damaging your domain ranking. If you use a tool like ahrefs.com, and analyse your backlinks, they will classify some backlinks as toxic and others as possibly toxic. It’s important to make sure the toxic ones are removed, to raise your domain ranking.

The greater the number of outgoing links, the less valuable each backlink becomes

Outgoing links (what in your case is considered a backlink) share the domain ranking of the original website. That sounds complicate, but it is not.

Example: A website has a domain ranking of 68. That’s high. Website rankings are a scale of 1 to 100, and achieving a high ranking isn’t easy. A domain ranking of 68 is something to be proud of.

This website in this example is very selective about whom they list as links on their website. They only have 3 outgoing links. Each link is worth 1/3 of the original website’s value, so 68/3 = 22.65.

Now, this company changes its policy and decide to add more links. Over the years, they’ve accumulated a total of 1200 outgoing links on their website. On a total of, say, 400 pages, that’s still only an average of only three links per page. The value of these links—an incoming backlink for you—is then 68/1200, or 0.056.

What are the consequences for your website ranking?

What are the consequences of those low values for your website ranking? If you wanted to boost it through backlinks, you’d need 1000 of these types of backlinks to create the same value for your website (domain) as one of the 3 links in the first part of the example.

Common mistakes

Your web developer or SEO consultant has advised you to focus on acquiring more quality backlinks for your website. However, many website owners resort to purchasing backlinks instead.

Buying backlinks

This is a widely accepted practice. It’s convenient, available across many platforms, and comes with appealing promises at reasonable costs. It can save you a significant amount of time. However, the outcome is often disappointing. Generally speaking, most backlinks yield a poor website ranking. This issue stems from a mix of several factors.

1. The original website didn’t have a very high ranking to begin with.
2. The ranking has to be redistributed across all outgoing links; almost nothing remains. Like a cookie, that has to be shared with thousands of people.
3. Sometimes the original website has absolutely no connection to your industry. It’s like a plumbing company’s backlink has anything to do with a milkman.

Search engines don’t like this at all, and they might even think you’re buying backlinks instead of providing your website with useful content for your visitors.

Creating real backlinks

This may seem like it will take more time, but if you’ve read this article up to this point, you’ll know it will actually take you less time. Just follow these steps.

• Make a list of websites—in your industry or related—that link to other websites.
• A wholesaler might be willing to list you as a client of a preferred business partner.
• Clients creating reviews with your URL in it (those are backlinks too!).
• Create a page on your website for outgoing links.
• Contact the company or organization and ask them for a link to your website. Of course, not everyone will immediately say yes, but remember that a single real link (rather than a purchased one) can generate up to a thousand times more value for your website than a purchased backlink.
• If it’s a (semi)commercial website, they might ask for a link in return. Remember that, while search engines don’t necessarily object to reciprocal links, it shouldn’t look like “we’re trading links to rank in Google”, as that will only result in negative points. If in doubt, you can avoid this by placing a link exchange on another website of yours, or to another website of theirs.

Create backlinks that point to a page on your website

Of course a link pointing to the root domain, like to wpinsight.eu instead of a specific page, is an asset, but a backlink pointing to a specific page is better for the SEO of that page. Example: https://wpinsight.eu/truth-about-backlinks/.

What is the difference between backlinks and referring domains?

The basics are the same; both types of links are links between websites. But there is a difference. An important difference.

A ‘standard’ backlink links from a certain page on a website, to a certain page on another website. This link is content oriented; that means the link in the text, article, or social media post adds value to the article the link is in. So, in essence, it’s a relationship between a page and another page (which happens to be on another domain).

A referring domain is a website that provides a link to your website. While backlinks highlight the connection between individual pages, referring domains indicate a link between whole websites.

What? I am confused. Is a link from one website to the other a normal backlink, or a referring domain?

A backlink occurs when a page links to another page on a different website, establishing a connection between the two domains. In this case, the linking site serves as a referral domain, directing traffic from one domain to another.

Let’s say a company is completely wild about your products or services. They place 3 backlinks on their site, pointing to one or several page(s) on your website. Those 3 backlinks represent only 1 referring domain.

Why is the difference important?

You can’t create a great SEO campaign if you don’t understand the difference between backlinks and referring domains — even if you understand how essential backlinks are for SEO.

The main issue; increasing your backlinks won’t significantly impact your SEO if you aren’t also increasing the number of referring domains. Getting one site to link to you 100 times isn’t half as powerful as getting 100 different sites to link to you once.

The objective is not merely to accumulate a high number of backlinks, but rather to secure a wide variety of referring domains.

It’s essential to grasp the connection between referring domains and backlinks when conducting a backlink audit, using tools like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest, for instance. You might come across numerous links and assume that your backlink profile is strong. However, if your ratio of backlinks to referring domains is very high, it actually indicates a weak link profile. In certain situations, Google could penalize you for such a profile, as it may imply questionable link-building strategies, such as utilizing paid links or a private blog network.

Why would a website give you a link?

• Not all incoming links contribute to domain ranking. Outgoing links do too! That’s logical. Outgoing links can help a website visitor find more information. We do assume, however, that the links are useful and industry-related. A search engine recognizes a pattern and assigns a value to each link, both incoming and outgoing.
• The website that linked to you, essentially, has the same goal in mind: improving their domain ranking. So you’re helping each other and simultaneously creating a better worldwide web.

Where to find real and serious websites that give links?

• Search the web for your work or products. You’ll eventually find those websites.
• Use a service like Ubersuggest and see how your competitors have performed. You can learn a lot from your competitors!
• A tip from Semrush: broken link building. That is finding websites with dead links and offer them to be the replacement link!
• Use a good SEO agency. They can analyse your site and the competition websites, and provide you with all the information you need.
• Sometimes you are lucky and your webmaster or developer is good at SEO as well.
• Whatever you do, always communicate with the webmaster/developer about this, so they what is going on. Good communication prevents problems and misunderstandings between the person or agency doing the SEO and the web developer.

Kind of links

There are several kinds of links. We mention the mostly used.

• Normal link. That means not one of the link types below.
• Nofollow (A visitor can follow this link, but Google does not assign any value to this type of link)
• Sponsored (A visitor can follow this link, but Google does not assign any value to this type of link, used for affiliate links. etc.)
• User Generated Content (UGC) (a link generated in user-generated content, like forum comments, social media, etc.)

Not all backlinks are equal

Some links are considered more authoritative than others, and carry more weight.

Various factors determine the authority of a backlink. One is the relevance of the web page providing the link. A backlink from a page on the same topic as your website is much more valuable, than a link from a page covering something irrelevant.

A second is the anchor text of the link. Because search engines use this text to determine what a page will be about, it helps if the link includes descriptive anchor text rather than a phrase like “click here.” Including a keyword in the anchor text of a link can be particularly powerful, but it’s easy to over-optimize links and be penalized by Google.

The authority of the website giving the backlink is also important. A backlink from a website that Google considers very authoritative, like The Washington Post, for instance, will carry more weight than a brand-new website.

Low authority backlinks aren’t worthless, though, and they certainly won’t hurt your site’s ranking, as long as they are not considered ‘toxic links’.

Referring domains also act as votes of confidence and can impact how authoritative each backlink is. Like backlinks, some referring domains are better than others. The metrics for measuring the quality of a referring domain are largely the same as they are for measuring the quality of backlinks, too.

Referring domains are higher quality if they are relevant to your website and are considered trusted authorities by search engines.

If you’re uncertain about the quality of a referring domain, you can check its domain rating using Ubersuggest.

Domain ranking is not static

Your domain ranking can fluctuate even if you haven’t made any changes and the search engine remains the same. It’s important to understand that this ranking is not an absolute figure, but rather a relative one.

What does it mean when we say domain ranking is relative? It refers to a ranking system that measures your performance in comparison to your competitors. If they perform poorly, your ranking can improve, but if they excel, your ranking will drop. Imagine you have two rivals with a ranking of 100—that’s the maximum. If they achieve better results, the search engine can’t boost their ranking any further. Instead, it responds by lowering yours. Keep in mind that domain ranking is all about the comparative difference between you and your competitors. So, even if your backlinks are in great shape, your domain ranking could still decline simply because your competition has gained some outstanding backlinks.

Let’s be serious, are backlinks really essential?

Oh, yeah. Let’s just show you a few numbers that will change your mind.

• A domain like cnet.com has 196 million of backlinks.
• Wired.com has around 165 million of backlinks.
• NY times has 770 million of backlinks.
• Smaller companies have between a few hundred and few thousand backlinks.

Conclusion

Don’t simply purchase backlinks. The reality is that backlinks are crucial and can benefit your website significantly. However, this is only the case if you focus on creating genuine value for search engines, both for your site and for the sites linking to you. Keep in mind that the quality of the backlinks matters most, and that’s an important detail that can easily slip your mind.