Recognise High-Quality Backlinks
There are several strategies for actively building backlinks, which we’ll cover in the course of this article. First of all, however, let’s look at what constitutes a high-quality backlink, and how you can develop a sense of the prerequisites for a good, and also a bad backlink. Since backlinks refer from one website to another website, you should make sure you the websites you link to have relevant themes and suitable content for your audience.
A topic’s relevance plays a central role, because if you get too many backlinks from websites with irrelevant content, Google and others may see this as an indication of an unnatural backlink profile. In addition to the topic relevance in itself, the website a backlink targets should also provide current, up-to-date information, because Google and co are becoming increasingly adept at recognizing how relevant the content of a website is on a particular topic.
Another important evaluation criterion for a high-quality backlink is whether it falls into one of two categories: DoFollow or NoFollow. A natural backlink profile usually has both NoFollow and DoFollow links, but you can generally assume that a DoFollow link is much more valuable for a search engine’s ranking system than a NoFollow link.
While a DoFollow link tells the crawler of the search engine to follow the link and look at the content on the linked website, a NoFollow link indicates the opposite; namely, that the crawler should not follow the link, as the content of the landing page is not sufficiently relevant. To find out if a link is a NoFollow or DoFollow Link, simply right-click on the link text and then select Examine:
Here is an example of a DoFollow text link: <a href=”https://amazon-affiliate.eu/en/load-time-site-acceleration/”> How To Speed Up Your Website’s Loading Time </a>”
Here is an example of a NoFollow text link: Here, the same link was set to NoFollow, which you can see from the inserted relation rel=”nofollow”.
<a href=”https://amazon-affiliate.eu/en/load-time-site-acceleration/” target=”_blank” rel=”nofollow noopener”> How To Speed Up Your Website’s Loading Time </a> ”
You can see the current visibility index of any website after logging in to SISTRIX Smart for free. The quality of backlinks on your website can best be analysed by adopting a ratio-based approach. For this, it makes sense that you look at the visibility index of your website and pay attention to any negative fluctuations in the graph, or specifically, any negative trends. A downward trend suggests that the webpage is decreasing in visibility: as you can see from the graph in the example below.
On the other hand, a website with a positive visibility index looks like this:
The following is a list of indicators that can show you whether a backlink is of a high quality:
- Quick checklist for a website with high-quality backlinks:
- Website has user comments and current content
- Links are relevant to your topic
- Links are DoFollow links
- Text links ‘naturally’ out of the content
- The visibility index is rising
- The domain age is over one year – below this, websites are ‘trusted’ less
- There is no significant loss of visibility of over 50% within a few weeks – if this is present, it could point to a Google penalty.
Quick checklist for a website with lower quality backlinks:
- There are no reader comments and no current content is available
- There are no relevant links
- Links are placed in less-viewed areas such as the sidebar and footer rather than linking from the main content
- There are many NoFollow links
- The visibility index is falling, over several months
- The website is outdated, with poor usability.
You do not necessarily have to check every new backlink against the quality criteria we’ve mentioned above, because, for example, if you leave a comment in a forum, it should be set to NoFollow anyway. In a guest post that you publish on another website, which includes an embedded backlink to your own website, it’s a different story: because in this instance, in contrast to a contribution to a forum, a contribution to a low-quality or irrelevant website can sometimes have a strong negative impact on the rankings of your own site. Also, you should always weigh up the considerable time required to write a guest contribution and decide whether it’s worth your while.