What are Backlinks and How Do They Work?
The Benefits of Backlinks in SEO
One of the most used words in the field of search engine optimization (SEO) is “backlink” or “link”.
But what is a backlink?
Backlinks are links to a specific page, article, category, product, etc. coming from other websites.
For better positioning in the organic results of search engines, you will need to build backlinks on various phrases or keywords. The Google search engine considers a website with many backlinks to be much more important.
Since 1999, the number of backlinks has been considered the main factor in ranking a web page. Meanwhile, search engine algorithms have evolved, and when they calculate rankings, they use more and more factors to display search results. But backlinks have remained the deciding factor to this day.
The evolution of algorithms has given search engines the ability to filter and categorize links. Therefore, engines give importance to natural and qualitative links and not to their quantity.
For example Site B belongs to a restaurant and receives a backlink from site A, which is a blog that promotes healthy eating. In this case, we are talking about a valid, natural, and relevant backlink.
Due to the importance of backlinks, there are a lot of incorrect practices to get them. Two of these search engine dislikes are the exchange or sale of backlinks.
What are the benefits of backlinks?
Many things have changed from the beginnings of SEO to the present day. There was a time when even low-quality links helped a site rank in results. Since Google launched the Penguin algorithm, the whole backlinking landscape has changed.
Today it is important for a site to have contextual links from quality sites. For example, you have a site about washing machines and you create links to a site about beauty, these links will not be useful. Your goal should be to get links from relevant sites.
The most important thing about SEO backlinks is that: it is not the number of backlinks that matters, but rather their quality.
Why are quality backlinks important and what are their advantages?
Faster indexing by search engines
When you create a new page or post on your site, it will not appear in search engine results as long as it is not indexed. Backlinks help search engine bots discover links to your site and access it.
Reference traffic
One of the major advantages of backlinks is that they help to get referral traffic. For example, if a link is created to your site in the context of an article on a popular news portal, then you have all the chances that it will receive multiple clicks, generating traffic. Usually, this traffic has a low rejection rate which brings additional SEO input.
Improve organic positioning in Google results
Backlinks help to get better rankings in search engines. If any of the pages on your site have organic links from other sites, this page will naturally be higher in results than the other pages.
Types of Backlinks
Link Building
The process by which you work on multiplying links to your site is called link building.
Low-Quality Links
Low-Quality links come from automated sites, spam websites, sites that publicly declare that they sell the link. Such links do more harm than good.
Link Juice
When a site obtains a link from another website, the latter transmits an amount of authority from its own authority. The amount of authority transferred is called link juice. Therefore, the more juice a site receives, the greater the authority of its domain. Authority transfer can be stopped by assigning a no-follow link tag.
Link Nofollow & Dofollow
Anchor Text
The text used for hyperlinks is called anchor text. Using anchor text correctly helps bring some keywords into Google’s results. For example:
Internal Links
Internal Links are links that go from one page to another within the same website. The process itself is called “internal linking”.
