Posted on March 11, 2020
Whether you have a newly-built site or a domain that is running for a while, you need to have good backlink building quality and follow these link building guide. Google algorithm is always evolving. Today, the backlink is the highest-ranking factor. If you want your site rank in Google’s Search Engine Result Page, your site needs a good link building strategy and backlink profile.
What is Backlink and how will it benefit your business?
Backlink comes in many names including incoming links, inbound links, external links, and inward links. However, in a nutshell, a backlink is simply a hyperlink from one website to another.
There are many reasons why website owners or SEO specialists make a backlink to another site. It can be a citation in which a website is tackling a topic related to your website; or one website is referring to or advertising your product, services, or pages. But the most important role of a backlink is that it helps your site increase its visibility online.
In SEO perspective, a backlink to one website signals the search engines like google that other websites are using your content. This could suggest that your content is relevant and has a high quality.
If many websites are setting up a link to your page, the search engine will conclude that the content of your site is worth linking to. However, a backlink isn’t about the quantity. Depending on the quality of backlinks you are getting, your page will rank or sink on SERP. We’ll discuss that later on this article
No-follow and DoFollow
Link Juice is the main reason why backlink is so important to a website. When your page has a backlink from another site, it passes a link juice. The search engine analyzes this link juice to identify what ranking position that the webpage should be placed on SERP. And the bigger the page it is coming, the more link juice you can get.
What if you don’t want to pass this link juice to another site? What should you do? Follow this link building guide process.
Good thing there are two meta tags you can use: the do-follow and no-follow.
You can choose one of these two links depending on whether you want to pass link juice or preserve them on your page.
The first-mentioned meta tag has more value in SEO. You’ll have to use dofollow backlink if you want to pass link juice to another site. Website crawlers count this link and help your site rank high in SERP. On the other hand, the no-follow links tell the search engine crawler not to follow the one specific link. This is done if you don’t want to pass link juice to another website.
While nofollow backlink doesn’t give link juice, this type of link has value especially if put inside a large website. The nofollow link can still bring a potential customer.
Trust Flow and Citation Flow
As we mentioned, backlinks aren’t created equal. The larger the referring domain, means more valuable link juice you can get. A dofollow backlink from a site like Forbes, CNN, and Yahoo, are gold in SEO perspective. On the other hand, having too many low-quality backlinks can be fatal to your site.
So, how do you know which backlink has more value? Follow this link building guide process.
Majestic SEO comes up with metrics called Flow Metrics that gives new information about the links. The flow metrics are divided into two categories: Citation flow and Trust flow.
The Citation Flow predicts how influential a URL might be based on how many sites link to it. The Trust Flow on the other hand measure how trustworthy a page is based on how trustworthy sites tend to link to trustworthy neighbors. High trust flow is a clear sign of having high-quality content for Google and other search engines.
You can use the flow metrics to measure the trust ratio of the site. You can calculate this by this equation: Trust Flow / Citation Flow = Trust Ratio
Don’t forget that the goal is to have a ratio as close to 1.
For example, if a site has a citation flow of 68 and a trust flow of 54 then the ratio is 1.259. With the trust ratio, you can say that the site has a link from trustworthy sites.
The domain authority
Domain Authority is another metric developed by Moz. The domain authority predicts a website’s ability to rank on the search engine results page. The metrics range from 1 to 100. Unlike the trust ratio, the higher the score, the better.
So, why domain authority is important to your link-building strategy?
According to the study of Moz, Low domain authority websites can potentially hurt your rankings if your site receives too many of that link. Search Engine especially Google might infer that you are trying to manipulate your ranking and penalize your site.
When you’re building links to your website, make sure to aim for high domain authority websites as they will give you more link juice.
Wrap up:
Backlinks or link building is indeed one of the complicated fields of SEO. In Google algorithm updated today, backlink holds the first spot as the most valuable ranking factor. To rank in the search result page, you need to have a good backlink profile.
Here’s the catch, the backlink profile doesn’t depend on the quantity of the backlinks your site is receiving. Or at least, not only. You also need to consider the quality of all those links.
If a lot of your links are low-quality that’s not a good sign to Google. In fact, if your site receives a massive number of these links you can get penalize and lose your ranking.
Before building a backlink from another site, make sure to research the domain authority and trust flow of the site. There are many free SEO tools, that you can use today. Make sure to take advantage of them to get a good backlink profile.
