Not all backlinks are the same—some will help you rank higher than others.
This shows that improving your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) performance is all about the quality of the links you can build for your site and not the quantity. Even hundreds of backlinks from average sites won’t compare to a single backlink from an authoritative site!
So, what makes for good—or even best—backlinks that will help your site rank on top of search engine results pages (SERPs)?
This post lists the different variables that compose high-quality backlinks your website needs. Knowing how these factors affect the kind of backlinks you should get helps you target the right prospects for your campaign.
Links from Sites with High Domain Authority
Domain authority refers to the site’s level of respect from its target audience and search engines. Authoritativeness, in this case, is measured by the quality of its link profile and the number of organic traffic it receives.
Backlinks are a form of recommendation that they consider when ranking a website to search engines. The more inbound links a site has from authoritative websites, the more authoritative it becomes in the eyes of Google and other search engines. As a result, its search engine rankings moved up due to the trust other websites have for it—else, they wouldn’t have linked to that site.
And because its keyword positions increased, more people will see the page on Google search and click on it. So, the increase in traffic is a byproduct of the site’s search rankings.
Using these factors, you want to get links from websites that Google and people consider authoritative. And to help you determine how authoritative a site is, a quick Site Explorer search of your link prospects on your Ahrefs account will show you metrics to help you make sense of its authority.
Using the data shown on the page above, you can organize which sites you must prioritize in your campaign. Securing links from these sites first enables you to get the most out of your link-building efforts.
Dofollow Links
Dofollow links refer to backlinks that pass PageRank (PR), also known as link juice, to your site.
PR was the metric used by SEOs to determine a site’s authoritativeness but was deprecated by Google in 2016. This left most SEOs using tools that showed how authoritative a site is based on the same principles according to Ahrefs’ Domain Ranking (DR) and Moz’s Domain Authority (DA).
The higher the DR/DA of a site is, the more juice your site will get from the backlink.
But it’s possible for websites to not pass link juice because they don’t want to share their authority with others. They do this by using the rel=nofollow attributes on all their outbound links.
So, no matter how high the DR/DA of the sites you got backlinks from, they won’t help improve your authority and move up the search rankings if they are nofollow links.
Recently, Google uses nofollow links as “hints” to determine whether to acknowledge the links with nofollow attributes in SERPs. Still, prioritize getting dofollow links first to get the most out of your link-building campaign.
Before building backlinks from authoritative sites, make sure that all their outbound links are set to dofollow.
Prominent Link Location on Page
Where your backlink on a site is located determines its strength. Ideally, contextually editorial backlinks found within the content body produce the best results for SEO. They could even be stronger if they appear close to the page’s title and sub-headings, which are ranking factors in their own right.
On the other hand, sitewide links found on the website’s sidebar or footer section won’t have much effort on your site’s SEO performance. They could even negatively impact your search rankings.
Also, the lower the location of your backlink is on the page, the less powerful it becomes. While leaving links on blog comments is still a link-building tactic, it won’t produce the same results as editorial links.
Right Types of Backlinks
Ultimately, the best backlinks are those you can quickly secure for your website. And to do this, you must determine which techniques to use for your link-building strategy. This enables you to uncover backlinks prevalent in your industry and acquire them quickly.
To help piece together your link building plan, below are the most popular tactics you can use for building links:
- Broken link building – Determine broken links on websites you want a link from. Then recover the broken web pages using Wayback Machine and publish an identical but much better version of the content. Finally, email the site owner informing them regarding the broken link and suggest your content as a replacement.
- Guest blogging – Request the site owner that you write a blog post. Include a backlink to your site located in the content body or its author bio in the article.
- Link reclamation – Identify links that you lost over time. Then send emails to the site owners requesting that they link your site back up.
- Unlinked mentions – Find quality websites that mention your brand but don’t link to your website. Then email site owners asking them to link back to your website using your brand name as anchor text.
To help you determine which among the techniques to implement in your upcoming link-building campaigns, use SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush.
They can help you conduct competitor research and uncover your competitors’ link building strategies. From here, you can build backlinks relevant to your industry, thus improving how search engines view your website.
But researching and identifying the best sites to build links on takes time and patience. Not to mention, securing them by sending follow-up emails to site owners is a different matter altogether.
If you don’t have the experience to execute a strategy that strives to build the best backlinks possible for your site, enlist our help at Linkplicity. We offer premium backlink packages ensuring that your site receives high-quality links that will improve your site rankings over time.
Conclusion
Now that you know the different factors that determine a backlink’s effectiveness, you should be able to build high-quality backlinks moving forward, whether it’s building them yourself or hiring someone to do the job for you.
This way, you can focus on other essential aspects of your online business while seeing a steady increase in your organic traffic.
