Better Your SEO With Backlinks in 2022

What is a backlink? We have the answer - BrightEdgeWhat is a backlink? A backlink can be either an internal link directing one page of your site to another page of your site or an external link which directs users from your site to an outside source. If another business is linking your site on their website, they trust your site and your content enough to link to it. This is helpful for SEO as Google monitors which sites trust your site and content. 

Reputable sites backlink to other reputable sites while spammy sites likely link to other poor-quality sites. Linking to any site with spam, can result in Google and other search engines penalizing your site. Search engines crawl and reward or penalize site ranks to avoid leading users to any sort of spam. If you link to poor-quality websites, there's a good chance your site will lose ranks.

Why does SEO link building matter?

Link building is a ranking factor for SEO. If other sites are linking to yours, they're indicating to search engines and readers that they see your content as authoritative and trust their visitors to you. 

Your collection of external backlinks is referred to as a backlink profile. In order to maintain a well-built backlink profile, you need to be sure you're creating quality content that informs readers. You also need to regularly maintain your site's health to ensure an error-proof user experience. You can leverage ContentIQ to perform a site audit and locate any errors that need fixing.

Importance of Quality Links

In April 2012 Google launched the Penguin update. This Google update was designed to downgrade sites that had artificially inflated their rankings by purchasing links or obtaining their backlinks through networks that were specifically designed to fool Google’s algorithm. Since then, there have been regular updates made to Penguin to continually check for sites that are abusing the backlink building process. These updates also reward sites that have gotten rid of the poor backlinks and instead focused on building quality links.

In addition to sorting out poor-quality links, Google also does not want to see links that all originate with the same anchor text or pairs of sites that continually link back and forth to each other. Attempts to manipulate the backlink system are all officially frowned upon by Google.

Monitor your success to see where your backlinks stand with Google. You can see how many you are able to cultivate from other quality sites through efforts to obtain backlinks naturally (link to project page about building backlinks) as well as any poor-quality backlinks, such as those from spam sites. With this information, you can properly prepare your strategy to maximize your backlink potential.

How do I monitor backlinks?

There are two main ways to monitor your strong backlink profile.

  1. You can use link:”your website” such as link:brightedge.com. This will pull up the list of sites that Google has that link to that specific website.
  2. You can also use tools like BrightEdge Backlink Management to better understand the profile of sites that are linking to your page. With BrightEdge, you will also be able to monitor the link profiles of your competitors and gain insights about the links that seem to have the most positive impact on their rankings and ideas that you can use to build your own profile.

Regardless of the method you choose, it is recommended that you disavow any links that come from poor quality sites. Although Google does not indicate these spam sites can hurt you, it is still a good idea to make sure that Google knows you want nothing to do with them.

Monitoring your backlink profile can help you understand where you have room for improvement and what sites need to be disavowed. It will help you improve your rankings and should be a part of any marketing strategy.

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