Backlinks

First of all, what is a backlink?

A backlink is a link back to your site from someone elses.

The types of backlinks

If you're going to spend time and effort sourcing links to your website to increase it's value then you need to know what kind of links you need and which ones to avoid. For the sake of this article, we are not looking at links from a user click or referral point of view but purely from a rank point of view.

Dud links

A dud link is a backlink that cannot be followed by a search engine. If you don't know your code then you may in trouble here but there are plenty of sites offering links where the search engines have no chance of finding your website, and if they can't find your website, you'll get no rank.

A typical example of a dud link would be:

The above code would look like:

To the untrained eye it's very difficult to know whether the link is any good or not. Basically, it's not. Dud links take many forms, javascript is common but the leading dud link is the redirect link. Although search engines can and do follow these links, you'll never get any rank from them so look at the links of the websites on the site and check the address to see if it looks something like:

Swap links or reciprocal links

Swapping links is the biggest practice of getting links to a website. Everyone is doing it but the search engines know this is just an exercise in the attempt at getting rank.

So what are the benefits of swapping links?

If you're not in a search engine that the other site is, then you'll get pulled into that search engine so it has a benefit in that respect. As for rank, there's little to be had. This wasn't always the case which is why you may well receive emails asking to swap links for the benefit of the search engines.

My site:

Your site:

By all means swap links, just don't expect massive gains in rank from it.

Natural links

The only kind of backlink you should be looking for so I guess we better look at what a natural link is.

A natural link is a link that is given because the site has value to your visitors. If you write a great article and I think it's of interest to my visitors then I'll place a link to it. I'm not asking for a link back, there's no catch involved with dodgy scripting, it's a pure and simple hyperlink direct to the resource of value.

Now to identify a natural link we need to identify the properties of a good natural link.

• It's not returned.
• It's not blocked by script.
• It's usually not linked to the homepage, rather the resource of value.
• It's contained in a paragraph of text and not part of a list.
• It's contextual, in other words the link forms part of the flow of a grammatically correct sentence.
• The link text describes the destination.
• It's on a page that has value or rank itself.

An example of a quality backlink would be:

Do you see the pattern? A good link is a link you haven't asked for, one that doesn't point to the homepage, rather information within the site. A good link is driven by good content. These give the biggest rank and have the highest value, particularly when the link text is descriptive of the destination.

Read my article about getting more traffic to realise how important content is.

Run a link check on your site to see how many good, natural links you have.