Backlinks Explained

Backlinks are the backbone of SEO. Although Google continues to deny their importance and swears that on-page engagement is the key to ranking (still a very important metric to consider!); the evidence shows that building backlinks and E-E-A-T are crucial for your website to appear in competitive SERPs.

The importance of quality backlinks has always been a factor in SEO, however, as the algorithm has been refined over the past couple of decades, the complexity of backlinks has grown.

In this blog, I will be explaining everything that you will need to know about backlinks and what makes a high-quality backlink.

A backlink is described as a HTML link from one website to another. Backlinks (also known as inbound links) are an important part in almost any SEO strategy. Think of it as a virtual recommendation or vote of confidence – when a site links to yours, it signals to search engines like Google that your content is valuable or credible. Backlinks play a significant role in determining how well a site ranks in search engine results. Generally, the more high-quality backlinks a page has, the better its chances of ranking higher, as these links act as indicators of trustworthiness and authority.

Backlinks have been important in SEO since 1998 with the introduction of the PageRank algorithm. This algorithm ranked web pages based upon the number of links were directing “power” (or link juice to my SEO brothers and sisters) to a particular page. This in turn increases the page’s authority within Google.

Picture this, you are looking for an expert B2B marketing agency to help with your search engine optimisation. You ask 30 people you know who they would recommend, and 5 people recommend an agency they know of. But 25 people recommend Beach Marketing (really good agency and I heard the SEO department is ran by a really cool guy). You will typically take the 25 recommendations over the 5. You could almost say the more recommendations an agency has, the more authority they have within that niche. This is how Google’s PageRank used to look at backlinks.

Now take a similar situation where you are looking to purchase car insurance and you saw one company receive 25 recommendations from users on Facebook, Twitter (I refuse to call it X), Reddit and so on. Whereas you saw another car insurance company receive 5 recommendations, but these recommendations were from moneyexpert.com, BBC, Go Compare and other high reputable, authoritative niches. Suddenly these 5 high value recommendations outweigh the 25 less authoritative recommendations. This is the new way in which Google and Bing looks at backlinks.

So, to answer the question above, no. Not necessarily the more backlinks a website has means the more authority or trustworthiness search engines deems it to have.

So, we have established that it is not all just about the number of backlinks to a particular web page that matters (although having a number of links is important), the quality of each backlink does also play a huge part in helping you rank your web page in Google Search.

Depending on your budget, strategy, area of interest and so on there are many factors to building backlinks that you will have to keep in mind in order to achieve your SEO goals.

This is the URL Rating of the specific page that you are analysing, this metric shows us the strength of the particular page’s backlink profile that we are currently looking at.

I tend to find that the UR is more significant metric to analyse when comparing one web page to it’s SERP competition.

Speaking to any SEO, you will hear them talking about follow and nofollow links. But what is a follow or nofollow link? And what does it mean?

Well, a follow link is a standard backlink that passes authority from the linking page to the linked page. When a website includes a follow link to another site, it signals search engines that they endorse or vouch for the linked content.

A nofollow includes a rel=”nofollow” attribute, which tells search engines not to pass authority from the linking site to the destination site. Essentially, it means, “I’m linking to this, but I’m not endorsing it”. Nofollow links don’t contribute directly to improving a page’s ranking, but they can still drive traffic and offer other indirect SEO benefits, like brand visibility.

The Top Level Domain indicates which nationality the website domain is under. You will tend to see country specific domains such as .co.uk, .de, .us and so on. How this affects SEO is by showing Google which countries your website is particularly relevant too.

For example, if we were to take a manufacturer who were struggling to break into the UK market, we would first look at their referring domains, understand if there were a lack of .uk Top Level Domains and start building links that refer from these domains – making them more relevant within the UK search and therefore growing their market share.

Each website will have a server which is providing the information that your device will need to load up your website. Many websites can be hosted on the same server, which will mean that you can get many websites with the same or a very similar IP address.

Google acknowledges the IP addresses of the websites that link to your own. Over time, you should naturally build up a good variety of IP addresses that are all linking towards your server IP (your website).

Issues begin to rise when Google can see that your website is getting a majority of your backlinks from the same source (same IP address). This can be seen as a website owner (or a dodgy SEO) utilising more unethical means (such as PBN’s that I will talk about later) to secure an abundance of backlinks to power the website. This can therefore create problems later in the SEO campaign.

Something that is often overlooked in SEO is the location of the link on page. Similarly to keywords, search engines determine the location of links as to how important the link is. For example, Google will deem links nearer the top of the page as more important to those at the bottom. This is why you will tend to see the main keywords and a link within the first 2-3 lines of a well SEO optimised blog post.

Each website has a spam score in Google’s eyes. This spam score metric estimates the likelihood of a website receiving a penalty from Google for violating their guidelines.

Spam score can also be affected via engaging in “spamming practices”. Now this can entail a lot of different techniques, however one of the main ones is through high volume, very low-quality links and content.

When looking to build a link from one website to another, it is important to check the referring domains and backlinks that have been built to the linking domain. Using SEO tools like Ahrefs can help you determine a referring domain’s ‘toxicity score’ and decide whether you should ‘disavow links’.

Sometimes you can build a bad backlink, or sometimes a bad backlink can be created naturally that may harm your performance. Sometimes all the signs point to that guest post or UGC backlink should have assisted your SEO efforts but instead you notice that it has harmed your performance.

This is where Google’s Disavow tool comes in handy.

What this tool does is tell Google that you do not wish to be associated with specific domains. There are many reasons that you may wish to do this, such as the domain may have a high spam score or may be producing content that you would like to distance yourself from.

Disavowing a link essentially tells Google that you don’t wish to be endorsed or associated with a specific domain, and therefore should be ignored.

I have to say though, that disavowing a link should be handled by an SEO expert who can understand the impact of link building. As disavowing the wrong domain can do more harm to your SEO performance.

User Generated Content (USG) is a type of link used for content that website users (not website admins) have placed. Typically, you can find these on forums, comment sections and other high traffic user generated content websites.

These links do act as follow links, so some authority (link juice) is passed through the link itself. However, they are not seen as an official endorsement from one domain to another.

The rel=”sponsored” attribute is an indication that the link or the content is a form of advertisement for a product/ service/ business. This form of link can often be found within guest posts (although not common), affiliate links, and other advertising related links.

Again, these links do act as follow links which does mean that they pass on authority and act as an endorsement.

Building backlinks is mostly about building your page and domain authority. Typically, the better your page and domain authority the better. Now the best way to do that is to build more backlinks to your website. But another way to achieve this is to build backlinks to your backlinks.

The chain of power (link juice) can trickle down through a series of links that end with the page that you are trying to rank online. This is what we call a tiered link strategy.

Typically, the tiered link strategy has 3 stages, and these stages are:

• Tier 1 – Guest posts, articles
• Tier 2 – Web 2.0 blogs, forums
• Tier 3 – Comment links

Here’s a visual to help you understand how tiered link building strategies works:

As SEO’s we want to try to build as many follow links as possible. A follow link indicates that the page linking to your website is endorsing you as a reputable source of information. However, not all websites will be happy to provide you with a follow link, and instead attach a nofollow attribute to the link to try to maintain as much (juice) within the page itself.

Worry not, this does not mean that the link built is “useless”. Instead, gradually building up a natural backlog of follow and nofollow backlinks is important to Search Engine Optimisation.

Google recommends that you should aim for a 70/30 ratio split between follow and nofollow links, but don’t take that for gospel as I have seen many websites with a 90/10 ratio perform well within SERPs.

Anchor text is the text used within links that users will read/ click on. An example of this would be “SEO experts” (very subtle Matt). The backend of this looks like SEO expert. Here we are just focusing on the text used between both the anchor tags (the “SEO expert” bit).

Notice here that I have used a keyword that is associated towards the page in which I am promoting. I have included a keyword that is relevant and which I would like to rank the page for.

Google looks at the anchor text used within links to determine what search terms that page is relevant for.

Now, naturally you will have a variety of anchors such as click here and see more (the typical Call to Action type of anchors). However, using a variety of different keywords as anchor text emphasizes that the linking page is relevant to that particular keyword. Now, whilst using exact match anchor text is advisable, it is important to remember that using a variety of partial match and exact match is important.

When using an image to link through to another page, it is important to note that the image’s alt (alternative) text is used as the anchor text. As this is what search engine bots crawl to understand what the image is displaying.

This is also the case for the words used within buttons.

Building links is good and all, however, they are meaningless unless Google has crawled them and added them into their index. Sometimes it can take a good while before a backlink is naturally indexed properly on search engines, and subsequently see the results of your hard work. Luckily, there are ways to index a web page and backlinks faster.

First of all, building more backlinks to your original backlink creates a spider “web” or chain of pages that can all be found by one of Google’s bots. This in turn increases the odds that a Google bot is going to locate, crawl, and render that web page, which should speed up the process of indexing the web page.

You can also run the web page through an indexing tool such as RepostSEO. What these tools do is submit your webpage through to Google and many other search engines which in turn should make Google crawl and index your web page/ backlink faster.

If you have come across any backlink seller, the chances are they are attempting to sell you backlinks from their own PBN (Private Backlink/ Blog Network). Typically, this will be a series of domains/ websites they have purchased for cheap and using paraphrasing tools and AI, they can rewrite content almost instantly which will pass Google’s duplicate content penalty. This content is then uploaded onto one or more of their sites for a fee.

Ethically, Google do not like SEO’s to be sourcing their links through these means, however, given the evidence of several case studies, this tactic still works.

Throughout my experience as an SEO and successfully executing backlink strategies myself, I know building backlinks is a proven way to improve SERPs. Securing and promoting high value links from other powerful and authoritative websites is vital to ranking in some very competitive niches, but sourcing these from Fiverr backlink sellers alone won’t get you there. SEO is much more complex.

Although backlink building is a critical success factor of SEO, it’s not the ONLY way to do SEO. To rank solidly and prove to search engines that you are an authority there’s more steps to take. Things like technical SEO, on-page SEO and quality content are additional measures you should take to see dramatic rises in organic positioning.