Backlink SEO? Importance of Backlinks In Google Page Ranking

Link pointing toward page — Link Pointing Toward Page

“Backlink” is one of the most used words in the world of SEO. Many bloggers who have only recently started a blog or a website often struggle to understand what the term “backlink” means. If you’ve read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you’ve come across the term “backlink” at least once.

backlink pointing to your website — Backlinks

For those of you new to Backlink SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, the difference between natural and Unnatural, how Negative SEO can Hurt your rank, how you can delete Unnatural links, and Use Disavow Tool to avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.

What are Backlinks (Backlink SEO) ?

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website or blog. Also, knows as Inbound links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website.

Backlinks are important for SEO purpose because some search engines, especially Google, bing, Yandex, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of Quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query. Backlink SEO means, at the time of the search, Search engine spider travel though this backlink to find more relevant content.

In simple words ” Backlink is a hyperlink that points to your website from another website “. It is act like a signal, which tells google that this content is high-quality content. Like a human being if we like something we point toward it and tell that is a good thing.

Introduction To Backlink

When search engines calculate the relevance of a site to a keyword, they consider the number of QUALITY inbound links to that site. So we should not be satisfied with merely getting inbound links, it is the quality of the inbound link that matters.

watch back link quality — backlink Quality

A search engine considers the content of the sites to determine the QUALITY of a link. When inbound links to your site come from other sites, and those sites have content related to your site, these inbound links are considered more relevant to your site. If inbound links are found on sites with unrelated content, they are considered less relevant. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater their quality.

Many webmasters have more than one website. Sometimes these websites are related, sometimes they are not. You have to also be careful about interlinking multiple websites on the same IP. If you own seven related websites, then a link to each of those websites on a page could hurt you, as it may look like to a search engine that you are trying to do something fishy.

Many webmasters have tried to manipulate backlinks in this way, and too many links to sites with the same IP address is referred to as backlink bombing (Artificial Backlink SEO).

Types of Backlinks

There are a two types of backlink, first one is Artificial Backlinks and Second one is Natural backlinks.

1. Artificial or Unnatural Backlinks

As from the name, it is clear that it is some type of Fake Backlink. What you mean by fake backlink, These are those backlinks that are purchased by the website owner. Many website sales backlinks and these are known to be artificial backlinks and I never suggest you buy backlinks as they are not as effective as natural backlinks.

Thus, it is wastage of time and money. Many of the bloggers use Artificial backlink to rank in google rapidly. But After Launching Google Panda, google slap all the blogger who are using Artificial backlink to rank in a google Search Result.

2. Natural Backlinks

Natural backlinks are those links which you get without your knowledge, it is when any website or blog links your page or website to their post as an example or reference. These are highly effective and helps in SEO of a website and have a positive effect on search engine ranking of a website.

Backlinks ( Backlink SEO ) should be natural, this means that a website must not use artificial ways to Create backlinks for their own websites. The quality of links is far more important than the quantity as we already learn

A backlink could be considered as a Quality Backlink if;

The Theme of the backlinking website is the same as your website.
It links to your website with the keyword (key phrase) that you are trying to optimize for.

Example: Website A is a website of Food and it gets a backlink from Website B which is a prominent food review blog or website. This is a valuable, natural, and relevant backlink that Website A has gained.

Due to the Importance of backlink SEO, there are lots of bad practices followed by website owners to gain backlinks. Some of these bad practices are

Purchasing backlinks.
Link exchange networks.
Selling backlinks,
Article Directory etc.

Most of these practices are not recommended by search engines. They usually deindex and penalize websites suspected of involvement in such practices.

Importance of Backlink For SEO

Now let’s take a look at why it is important for you to create backlinks to your website.

Improving Organic Ranking
Faster Indexing of Website
Referral Traffic

backlink drive traffic to your website — Drive Traffic

Improves Organic Ranking:

Backlinks help in getting better search engine rankings. If any of your content is getting organic links from other sites, that content will naturally rank higher with search engines. Your primary goal should be to create links to individual posts/pages along with your homepage. so that your post can rank on Google first page and you get a lot of traffic without ant social sharing.

Faster Indexing Of Website:

Backlinks help search engine bots like google spider to discover links to your site and to crawl your site effectively. Especially for a new website or blog, it is important to get backlinks as they help in the faster discovery and indexing of your sites. Faster indexing means, your post or page rapidly indexed and show in search result very easy on google first page.

For Example:- If you write the latest news and it indexed by google after 1 day then think how many traffic you lost in that news. So backlink also play an important role for news related websites.

Referral traffic:

One of the major benefits of backlinks is that they help to get referral traffic means traffic of on website A is come to your website B by that link. This link is acting link a one-way bridge visitor can come to your website but never go back through the same backlink. Usually, referral traffic helps to decrease the bounce rate.

Link Juice: When a web page links to any of your articles or your website’s homepage it passes the link juice. This link juice helps with the ranking of the article, and also improves the domain authority. As a blogger, you can stop passing the link juice by using a nofollow tag.
Nofollow Link: When a website links to another website, but the link has a nofollow tag, that link does not pass the link juice. Nofollow links are not useful concerning the ranking of a page, as they do not contribute anything. In general, a webmaster uses the nofollow tag when he is linking out to an unreliable site. Example: Links from comments on other blogs.
Do-follow link: By default, all the links that you add to a blog post are do-follow links, and these pass the link juice.
Linking Root Domains: This refers to the number of backlinks coming to your website from a unique domain. Even if a website has linked to your website ten times, it would be considered as the one linked root domain.
Low-Quality Links: Low-quality links are links that come from harvested sites, automated sites, spam sites or even porn sites. Such links do far more harm than good.
Internal Links: Links that are going from one page to another within the same domain are called internal links, and the process itself is referred to as internal linking.
Anchor Text: Text that is used to hyperlink is called anchor text. Anchor text backlinks work great when you are trying to rank for particular keywords.

Why Should You Care About Link Building?

Essentially, every time a site links to your pages, it’s saying that it finds them worthy of sharing with its readers. When search engine spiders find a site with lots of other sites pointing to it, they conclude that the site provides quality information that should be rewarded with high rankings.

There are backlink characteristics that matter in rankings algorithms.

For example, a backlink from a high ranked site will count more than one from a low ranked site. A link from a relevant site within your industry also will get more weight. But since search engines can’t manually assess the quality of every site, they rely on the number of backlinks pointing at a site and the relative quality of the links to determine a site’s overall value.

Negative SEO has become a problem. While most webmasters know that other websites can be damaged by adding low-quality links to these sites, there are more things that your competitors can do to hurt your Google rankings.

What Is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO describes the things that other persons can do to lower the position of your web pages on Google by pointing low-quality backlink to your site

Negative SEO started to occur following Google’s Penguin update when it became common knowledge that Google would apply penalties for manipulative links. Some persons started to build artificial backlinks that pointed to competitors to trigger Google penalties for the competitor websites.

Here “Matt Cutts” addresses questions about negative SEO.

What Happens To My Site If Google Detects Unnatural Links?

Google or Google spam team, primary purpose to make sure that every user receives good quality content or relevant content and protect the user from receiving bad search result. As a explain above about backlink, how backlink help to increase page rank and put you on google front page. If your page rank suddenly increase the main reason behind this is a backlink (So people’s purchase quality backlink to get a higher position in google). If google detects that your website reaped rise in google due to backlink SEO, google will send a message through email and tell you to take an action on your link building.

A format of message Send By googles to you.

Dear site owner or Webmaster of http://www.example.com/, We’ve detected that some of your site’s pages may be using techniques that are outside Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. Specifically, look for possibly artificial or unnatural links pointing to your site that could be intended to manipulate PageRank. Examples of unnatural linking could include buying links to pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. We encourage you to make changes to your site so that it meets our quality guidelines. Once you’ve made these changes, please submit your site for reconsideration in Google’s search results. If you find unnatural links to your site that you are unable to control or remove, please provide the details in your reconsideration request. If you have any questions about how to resolve this issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support.

So this a message you will receive when you break the google backlink guideline or use paid backlink to rank higher in google.

Note:- Google not telling you to take an action on your whole website, they just telling you to take an action on your some page which is rank higher than they deserve due to backlink.

If you do not take an action on it within 30 days then google penalized your site. Effect on your website after google detect unnatural link are,

You might not rank at all in Google for something you used to rank for very well for.
Your traffic might reduce month by month.
You might disappear overnight for valuable keywords associated with your content.
You might disappear for one keyword phrase.
You might be reviewed, manually.

Google appears to crawl a site slower under a penalty. Google caches changes to your pages a lot less frequently, too, it seems, and fresh content seems to struggle a bit more to get into Google’s index. In some cases – you might not rank for your brand name. All this thing happen due to Unnatural Backlink SEO

In the very worst cases – your site and all its pages can be removed from Google. It can be ‘de-indexed‘. When you get a penalty revoked, things start to get back to normal within a month or two.

How To Find Unnatural link

As I explain above in the Artificial Backlink SEO, PAID LINKS are the REAL toxic links Google is looking to penalize you for, and these leave a nasty footprint e.g,

a high % of backlinks on low-quality sites
a link from 404 error page
a high % of backlinks on duplicate articles
a high % of links with duplicate anchor text
links from irrelevant sites or articles
footer links on unrelated sites

How do I know which links to remove?

You don’t worry about now to know that which link is good and which one is bad. After under manual penalty google gives you one or two example so that you can take an action on it.

You can also identify the low-quality backlink by simple checkout the fallowing step

Check the Alexa rank of website
Check the page rank of the page
Check is it spammer or not
Make a visual look on other content
Use Google Webmaster Tool To find Recent Link

If you think this website is not good or have some type of bad content on it, Just message the website owner to delete this link.

You can track your site’s backlink profile using the Backlink Tracker by Sitechecker.This tool provides a wealth of data to help users optimize their site’s backlink profile. Users can track their backlinks by various parameters such as domain authority, page authority, and anchor text.

How To Remove Backlink Manually

The link removal process can be time-consuming if you want to get rid of hundreds or thousands of links. Note that it’s impossible to remove all backlinks. Nonetheless, in order to remove a penalty, you have to prove Google that you have done your best to clean up your website’s backlinks profile, before submitting a disavow report.

To remove backlinks, you have to contact the webmasters of the website and ask them nicely to delete the link pointed to your site. NEVER threaten a webmaster and be very polite if you want to be treated the same.

Follow these steps to remove a bad backlink

Step1:- Identify the link you want to remove

Go to google webmaster tool, Click on Link to Your site under Search Traffic.

link to your site location in webmaster — Webmaster Tool

Select which link you want to remove.

For example, here I’m selector want no link from “yekmizban.com” So I clink on it. A new window will be open and you can see which page of your website is linked to that domain as shown below.

which link attach to post — Webmaster Tool

This image shows that the Anchor text that the other website owner uses to make a backlink.
Now click on it and you will see the page of the other website owner, where he/she make a link to your website.

Which page Link to your website — Webmaster Tool

Now you have an information where and from where you got the backlink i.e unnatural backlink SEO

Step2:- Find the contact information on the website. You can use Whois.com to check the website detail. Whois can help you find the email address used to register the domain or host the website.

Step3:- Send an email to the webmaster, and make the location of the link you want to remove very clear. Try to ease the webmaster job and make sure he can find and remove your link in less than one minute

Note:- If you are not getting a reply in 5-10 business days, send a follow-up.

Email templates

Below you will find the backlink removal email templates. Replace and edit them according to your needs.

Hi [Name],

My name is [YOUR_NAME], and I work with [YOUR_WEBSITE]. We are currently trying to remove some links pointing to our website, and I would appreciate if you would be kind to help us.

Your website links to our website from here: [URL_OF_THE_PAGE_LINKING_TO_YOU].

It points to this page of our website: [URL_OF_YOUR_SITE]

And it’s using the anchor text [ANCHOR_TEXT_USED_FOR_YOUR_LINK].

I’m kindly asking you to remove the backlink to our website. Thanks in advance.

Wish you all the best with your website

Regards

[YOUR_NAME]

It’s impossible to remove all the bad backlinks. With the backlinks you can’t remove, you’ll have to create a disavow report (by using Disavow Tool) and submit it to Google Webmaster Tools.

What is the Disavow Tool?

A tool provided by Google in Google Webmaster Tools. You can specify which domains you want to disavow the links from (you can also specify individual pages). Generally speaking, if disavowing a link, you are better of disavowing the entire domain (if it is a spammy domain). you can read more about it on google blog

If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site.

Google has said that they will treat links found in your disavow file as nofollow links.

Note:- This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.

Read Google Disavow Tool Guideline before using Disavow tool.

How To Use The Disavow Tool

Upload a list of links to disavow:

Go to the Disavow links Tool
Select your website.
Click Disavow links.
Click Choose file.

Note:- It may take some time for Google to process the information you’ve uploaded. In particular, this information will be incorporated into our index as we recrawl the web and reprocess the pages that we see, which can take a number of weeks.

Can I use Disavow Tool Before Manual Action

According to Matt Cutts, Yes you can use Disavow Tool if you feel someone try to hurt your SEO by Adding Unnatural Backlink SEO

I hope this article will help you to understand the basics of backlink SEO, and why you should start working on getting backlinks for your blog. I will explain it latterly how you can make high-quality backlink for the website.