Backlinks are those links which are pointed towards your website from another website. These links are a vote of confidence to your website, and help in ranking on search engines like Google, Yahoo. Bing and Baidu.
Further, there are four types of backlinks based on , do-follow, no follow, with anchor texts, without anchor texts. Based on the combination of these types, there could be several more types of backlinks.
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Why do I need Backlinks?
Backlinks are those links that points users to your website from any other website. These links are often added to provide some kind of reference such as facts, data, original source, etc. The benefit of adding such links is that, since you are providing verifiable information, it increases your website’s trust in front of the user.
Backlinks divert traffic from the website which hosts it and towards the website to which it points.
Further, backlinks provide you with much needed link juice, a metric which helps in building the Domain Authority(DA) of your website. Higher, the number of backlinks and referring domains, higher will be its Domain Authority. This high DA helps in easy rankings on Google which gets you more traffic.
Here is an example of how beneficial backlinks are:
The above image shows a Google search result for a search query on : “how does a mobile work?”
Although the first website has a lower domain authority, it has a much high number of backlinks which helps it rank higher than a website with higher domain authority.
However, there are several other factors, than just backlinks, that help decide which page should rank higher, like on-page SEO, quality of content, comprehensiveness, etc. Yet, in my personal experience, backlinks have the highest impact in rankings.
What are the Types of Backlinks
There are different types of backlinks from different perspectives.
In terms of HTML, there can be the following categories of backlinks. List is non-exhaustive. You can find an exhaustive list on Geeks for Geeks.
- alternate, which shows the alternate version of the page
- author, which connects to the author of the page
- dns-prefetch, it mandates a browser to perform DNS resolution of the target resource’s origin
- help, specifies that the link in pointed towards a help page
- icon, points towards an icon image
- license, shows that the link showing details about the intellectual property
- next, shows the link for the next page in order
- pingback, shows the specified address of the pingback server
Based on whether the source website considers it an organic link:
- Do Follow Links, are the highest quality links. They tell Google that the website is an important and organic backlink.
- No Follow Links, are those which a website asks Google to ignore.
Based on whether an anchor text is provided in the source page.
- Without Anchor: These are the links that do not have an anchor text associated with the target page and the link is simply mentioned.
- With Anchor Text: These links have some anchor text that can provide a context regarding the nature of the target link.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can local businesses benefit from backlinks? How?
Backlinks are very essential to rank on Google. They act as a system of trust transfer. More the number of backlinks from high quality sources, the more would Google prefer your website to rank. Backlinks are a part of Google’s EEAT necessities.
How to get do-follow backlinks?
You can only ask the person who is responsible for posting on the website. Whether they give do follow or no follow backlink, depends on their choice.
What is the best way to build backlinks?
The best way to build backlinks is to do nothing. Just create content so good that people automatically link to it. This method is slower but also the most effective.
How can I rank my blog without a backlink?
The most straightforward way is to create content (that satisfies Google) and hope someone notices and links to it.
However, that seldomly works.
At Ingeniare AI, we use an advanced method to rank articles through PR which attracts quality backlinks as well as traffic.
Is Quora good to build backlinks?
Yes, Quora is a good place to build backlinks but those backlinks would only matter if the question has a decent traffic. This is unique to Quora.
How do we create quality backlinks?
The highest quality backlinks are those which come from websites that have
1. a high domain authority
2. has a low spam score
3. does not link to too many websites
4. has a good backlink profile for itself.
You can acquire high quality backlinks by simpley finding broken links on websites and then asking them to link to your page. But, before all this, make sure you have created a wonderful page with high quality information.
Are backlinks still important in SEO?
Yes, backlinks are very much the core of what decides your Google ranking. This is because backlinks act as a vote of confidence to your website.
