Six factors that determine the quality of a backlink
If you start learning some basic SEO concepts, you’ll probably comes across backlinks before long. You’ll find out what they are and why you need them.
Backlinks are links on other sites that lead to your company’s website, and vice versa. If you need to build up your backlinks to help your site get to the top of the SERPs, there are backlink services that you can hire to help you. They will build you quality backlinks that should help to get your site the attention it deserves.
However, before you hire anyone to help you, you need to understand the factors that determine a backlink’s quality. In this article we cover six important ones to know.
1) Avoid the dreaded 404 error message
Let’s say you placed a backlink API on your site, but when someone tries to click on it, it leads to a website page that gives them a 404 error message.
If you see this message, it probably means that the link worked at some point, but it broke in the time since you installed it. If you see this, you should remove that link, as it’s hurting your SEO.
2) Link to sites with a high page ranking
Every site has a page ranking that is assigned to it by Google. If you link to a website with a very poor page ranking because no one visits it or it doesn’t use the best fundamental SEO practices, that can be harmful to your site. So get rid of those backlinks.
3) The anchor text must make sense
When you use anchor text and link to a different website, you want that anchor text to be relevant. If the text you use doesn’t relate to the anchor text in any way, that’s poor SEO, and Google could penalize you for it.
4) Where you position the link matters
There are logical and illogical places to position a link on a page. For example, if you position a link front and center on one of your product pages, that makes sense.
If you position a link at the very bottom of a page where it’s hard to find or notice, it looks like you are trying to hide a link that doesn’t make sense, and Google doesn’t like that. It could penalize you until you move the link to a more prominent spot where all your site visitors can see it.
5) The anchor text should sound natural
When you search for keywords to feature on your site for SEO purposes, you can use them in a way that sounds natural, or you can feature them in a way that sounds forced or stilted.
If you use keywords for an anchor text that leads to another site, but that anchor text sounds garbled, Google will regard that as low quality.
6) The anchor text must lead to a prominent site
If you send your visitors to another site via a backlink, and that site clearly exists for no other reason than as a collection of random backlinks, that’s black hat SEO. Black hat SEO is an unapproved practice, and Google could drop your site down the rankings for using it.
