A backlink is a hyperlink that comes from one page to another page. These hyperlinks are basically incoming links to a webpage from an external website/webpage. A backlink is a very essential aspect of Google Search Engine. When you get the incoming links from external pages Google believes your content is trustworthy.
To understand backlink, let’s consider I have a webpage called (page 1) and inside that, there are a couple of external links pointing to some other page of another website.
Now assume you have a webpage too called (page 2) which was the page I have mentioned from my page with a hyperlink. In this scenario, you can say “yes my page (page 2) has a backlink from (page 1).
Check the image below,
Backlinks can help in boosting web pages rank higher on Search Engines. High-quality backlinks drastically increase the visibility of a web page and improve the domain authority. It is a critical part of your website’s overall growth.
Types of backlinks
Technically there are two types of backlinks when an author or publisher adds HTML links to mention a specific page.
- Dofollow backlink
- Nofollow backlink.
Dofollow Backlinks…
A dofollow backlink basically is the one that has the ability to pass link juice to the destination page by commanding the Search Engine Bot to follow the link.
Dofollow links are recognized by the rel attribute which is used to define the type of links. So a dofollow link can be written as,
Remember: If a link does not have the rel attribute then it’s considered as dofollow link.
Other dofollow backlink related guides,
Nofollow Backlinks…
In the opposite way, a nofollow link attribute does not allow search engine bots to follow the link.
That means if the website owner is linking back to you with nofollow attributes, it does not pass on link juice. So basically only a human who is reading that page can read or follow that link.
Since nofollow links are not going pass link juice they are not going to help in ranking. They are just a link to another URL where you may find some useful information related to the current page topic.
You can check this detailed guide about nofolllow backlinks.
How do you check a link is dofollow or nofollow?
While viewing a page without knowing what’s the internal HTML has you could be confused about how to know what is a backlink type.
Since you know the structure of links inspecting a page can tell you a link inside a page is dofollow or nofollow.
You can have a look at the page source instead inspect the page to find the hyperlink type.
If the HTML doesn’t include the rel attribute you should figure out that it’s a dofollow backlink.
Else look for the “dofollow” rel attribute.
in terms of the nofollow link, you can find the nofollow attribute in the hyperlink HTML,
Another option is to use the “Strike Out Nofollow Links” Chrome extension.
This extension automatically puts a line through over any nofollow links on a page. See the example below.
How important are these backlinks for your website?
Let’s understand one thing since the nofollow backlinks don’t pass link juice it doesn’t boost your page rank by any means. However, it still can provide your page human visitors who are interested in the content.
Now the dofollow backlinks are important for your site’s technical growth. Because they pass link juice it will benefit your site by increasing the power or trust of the page in search engine’s eyes.
The basic concept is simple, you can assume each dofollow backlink as a trust point towards your page that helps you to go up the word in Google’s ranking algorithm.
See this graph example below,
Google uses backlinks as one of many metrics to measure the value of a page. If a page gains qualitative external links then it has higher chances to rank up on SERP. The higher you will rank on SERP, the more visibility you will get. Remember that most people intend to click on the first few links while searching for a query.
When a web page is linked by other web pages then search engines consider it as a high relevancy web page that means your content may be trustworthy.
The importance of creating backlinks in SEO to boost organic traffic on your web pages. So basically it will bring more people to your website from an external page and organic search as well, definitely a win-win deal.
How link quality varies?
Not all dofollow backlinks are the same or good to be linked with. High-quality backlinks are those which come from authoritative sources. While some low-quality backlinks may make detrimental effects on your site which eventually leads to lower your domain authority.
You can find your backlink quality by collecting the link toxic score which is basically a matric that calculate the probable risk of incoming link from 0 to 100 where lower score determine safe linking.
Check out the image below,
Spam backlinks can make a detrimental impact on SEO and domain authority. One quality backlinks are better than 100 spam backlinks.
Relevant backlinks play an important role in boosting page rank. Incoming links from external websites should match your website’s niche. Relevant backlinks make your site more reliable, eventually, search engines consider your content is more reliable in your field or niche.
Hence, Relevancy and quality of backlinks are vital for website SEO.
How to get backlinks?
Building backlinks takes decent amount of efforts and time. There are various ways to start building backlinks. Depending on your approaching strategy and quality of content your site have backlink will grow over time.
Here’s few ways you can start using to earn backlinks from other sites,
- Start creating valuable, in-depth articles that solve people’s problems if possible a detailed tutorial.
- Create insightful content to light up trust in people’s minds.
- Share your content on social media, try to reach the relative audience. (Guide to schedule social media posts for better engagement)
- Write short but pointed “how-to” and “why” posts, they have a higher tendency to be linked.
- Whenever you find a good topic while surfing pick that and create a better version of the article than the first three ranked pages.
- Write quality guest posts for a better site and ask for a shoutout to the owner.
- Contact influencers on your niche and tell them about an article on your site that they would like to share or link to.
- Use semrush to identify your possible prospects and try to get backlinks from them using the recommendation provided by semrush.
Identifying backlink possibility is the most important part of growing your website backlink profile. Hopefully, semrush provide this amazing feature where you can provide your targeted keywords and it will automatically find out what are the promising site you can try to reach and work for earning a backlink from them.
They also provide you guide and quick reaching tool so that you do not have to manually find those information.
How to check your website backlinks?
There are lots of tools available to check your site backlink profile. I personally prefer to use Ahref backlink checker and Semrush Backlink Analytics. Both are free to use and gives you good details that encourage you to create more backlinks to your website.
See the example below, (Semrush Backlink Analytics)
Wrapping up:
This is short guide on basics of backlinks, how they help your site and how to improve the backlink count for your site. There are more in depth articles about backlinks advance knowledge and strategy to earn them more efficiently.
Once you have a good grip on the basics you can certainly proceed to the next level. Hope this guide will help you push towards that level.
Regarding any query related to this post, drop comment below. Also you can check out previous publishing such as,
Follow our social media profiles on Twitter and Facebook 🙂
Need help with getting stuff done? Try Fiverr! You can find content writers for your website at a reasonable rate.