Backlinks: Does Quality Count?
The Google Webmaster Blog recently released a post talking about “low-quality backlinks.” I thought I would share some of the information from that article and talk about backlinks in general and the role they play in search engine optimization. First of all, what is a backlink?
A “backlink,” sometimes referred to as an “inbound link,” is a link on another website that links back to a page on your site. Why is this important to search engine optimization (SEO)? Backlinks are one of the things Google uses to rank your website. In fact, in this blog post Google says that backlinks are “a significant factor in Google’s ranking algorithms.” (For more on this and SEO in general download and read our SEO White Paper.)
Google’s use of backlinks in their “ranking algorithms” includes both quantitative as well as qualitative factors. Quantitative means the total number of backlinks to your site. Qualitative refers to how highly ranked the sites are that are linking back to you.
While no one knows the exact math used in the Google algorithms, it does seem clear that one backlink from a highly ranked site is worth more than several from lower ranked sites. That being said, it does not hurt your SEO to have lots of backlinks from lower-ranked sites.
Ideally you would have both: a few links from highly-ranked sites and lots of links from lower ranked sites. A good SEO strategy attempts to achieve this.
Risk Factors
One thing to be aware of is to avoid backlinks from “spammy” type websites. This would be links from sites that don’t appear to be “legitimate,” such as link farms or sites that are just full of pages that hold only advertising and no real content. Google suggests that you can try contacting these sites and ask to have your links removed, but they say not to be too concerned about this.
Google offers this, what I believe to be good, advice, if when when trying to get links removed from dodgy sites you run into some uncooperative site owners:
“… don’t fret for too long. Instead, focus on things that are under your control. Generally, you as a webmaster don’t have much control over things like who links to your site. You do, however, have control over many other factors that influence indexing and ranking. Organize your content; do a mini-usability study with family or friends. Ask for a site review in your favorite webmaster forums. Use a website testing tool to figure out what gets you the most readers, or the biggest sales. Take inspiration from your favorite sites, or your competitors—what do they do well? What makes you want to keep coming back to their sites, or share them with your friends? What can you learn from them? Time spent on any of these activities is likely to have a larger impact on your site’s overall performance than time spent trying to hunt down and remove every last questionable backlink.”
5 Comments
October 23rd, 2009 at 12:29 am
Hmm… I read blogs on a similar topic, but i never visited your blog. I added it to favorites and i’ll be your constant reader.
October 25th, 2009 at 8:30 pm
I really like your blog and i respect your work. I’ll be a frequent visitor.
October 27th, 2009 at 9:30 am
I found your blog on Google. I’ve bookmarked it and will watch out for your next blog post.
October 28th, 2009 at 6:13 am
Google preaches the next generation of web presence in a word – “relevance.” So if you create and get back links that are relevant to the source, this is the key to creating or receiving quality back links.
December 17th, 2009 at 11:38 pm
Backlinks are popular enough to be mentioned twice. Ensure that the backlinks come from a variety of popular domains that are relevant to your website. Try to get links from all different types of websites (news, blogs, old, new, borrowed and blue (?). OK, maybe forget about the “blue”, but I’m sure you get the idea. If all your backlinks come from one small subsection of the Internet, Google might think that you’re very relevant to that subsection. Or, they might think you’ve using some devious and underhanded technique to get backlinks. All I can say here is “be careful”.