If you observe users’ behavior, you will see that the majority of online activities today start with search engines. So, if you want your business to be visible, you need to make sure your website ranks high on search results. Speaking of which, backlinks, as an essential part of SEO optimization, can significantly help you with it. However, considering that Google often changes the way it reevaluates algorithms to achieve its priorities, not all backlinks are good. By understanding how Google defines high-quality backlinks, you will be able to boost your ranking effectively.
Things to learn about how Google defines high-quality backlinks
The quality of backlinks differ. There are high-quality backlinks you can get from relevant and authoritative sites. But there are also low-quality backlinks from other, often suspicious, sources. In general, if your backlinks belong to the first group, it can positively affect your rankings. If not, it increases the chance to be penalized by search engines and lower your ranking position. Because you need to be careful with your backlink campaign, a good choice is to find proven and experienced professionals to help you with your SEO. They have a deeper understanding of how things work, and a commitment to follow all recent changes. Make use of it.
What is “backlinking”?
To better understand how everything functions, you need to understand what backlinks are. Any link from another website that is sending users to your website is considered a backlink. This type of connection that associates websites across the web, exchange a specific value between them. That’s how this “backlinking” help your users to find relevant content across the internet. The more relevant source of the link is, the more of this value your website acquires. In a broad view, Google estimates these values and rank websites accordingly.
How backlinks quality matter?
The value we mention, in SEO circles, is called link juice. Before Google decides to change things with updates and algorithms, you could get more value by only having a large number of backlinks. We can say that they had only a certain generic value. But today, you can’t rely on sheer quantity anymore. Your backlinks have to be quality links or they won’t benefit you. Even worse, bad links can cause penalties.
Since the Penguin update, the focus shifted to quality. Because Google wants to prevent any type of manipulation and provide only relevant results, your SEO strategy needs to focus on quality.
What high-quality backlinks do?
By redirecting users to relevant content, backlinks increase your website traffic. Which is, by itself, beneficial. Also, if Google notices your website is a source of relevant material, you will be easier to find on SERPs. Overall, this will lead to a better organic ranking that is necessary to survive among the heavy competition in long term. Here are some other general benefits of having high-quality backlinks:
- backlinks improve your website authority – if you have high-quality backlinks from other authoritative websites, it’s like having votes of high value. Google then catches these as signals of trustworthiness and list your website higher.
- they increase the Link Juice of your website – the more juice you get from valuable links, the higher is your chance to outrank other similar websites.
- help you build a strong network – backlinks are an excellent way to expand and enhance your relationship with other websites. With such a strong network of connections, you will be able to promote your website further across the internet.
In the end, this matters because Google wants to prevent irrelevant and low-quality websites to rank higher in search results. With a good backlink campaign, even without new content, you won’t have to worry about this.
How Google defines high-quality backlinks?
Google uses numerous factors to determine the quality of your backlinks. In fact, there are over 200 general factors with more than 40 that concerns links. With this in mind, here is what you need to pay attention to when planning your SEO campaign:
- Relevance – referring to other content has to be done with relevance in mind. The link that points to another source of information needs to connect the relevant subjects.
- Domain Authority – the links that point to you from authoritative domains hold great value. Simply put, they boost your credibility and authority in a given field. For example, if you have a backlink from the Wikipedia website, it shows users that your website is trustworthy.
- Singularity – there are industry-related platforms and similar authoritative websites that don’t accept linking for just anyone. If you have links from such places, it shows that you are a uniquely valuable source of information, services, or products in that industry.
- Human benefit – websites that link to your content has to provide usefulness to their visitors. In a way, if your backlink is coming from a completely irrelevant place with which you have no connections, it has no true value to visitors.
- Backlink placement – links integrated coherently into useful content are more valuable than those artificially placed in other places, just for the sake of it.
- Backlink diversity – Google favors websites whose backlinks are coming from different places. The more unique domains and IP addresses they are coming from, the better.
- Links from trusted sources – of course, links from trustworthy websites, just like authority, means more than others. For example, Google considers .com, .net, and .gov websites trustworthy and reliable sources.
What can you do to improve the quality of your backlinks?
To improve the quality of your backlinks you have to optimize your links building strategy. Here are a few tips about what you can do:
- Optimize your content accordingly
- Make moderate use of guest blogging
- Find websites with a good reputation and try to get backlinks from there
- Utilize conferences and your connections
- Team up with similar websites
- Implement proper email marketing
- Try to follow Google’s guidelines and recommendations
A lot depends on how Google estimates the usefulness of your backlinks, so it’s important to understand how Google defines high-quality backlinks. After all, it’s their search engine, it’s their game. To stay on track, you need to always follow the recent changes and try to adjust your backlink strategy when it’s required.