This article explains the relationship between backlinks and SEO (search engine optimization), the impact of backlinks on website rankings, the concept of PageRank, how Google views links, good and bad ways to build backlinks, and how to obtain backlink information for free.
This article was first published on 2016-04-13 and is one of the articles with the highest natural search traffic on this website. It was updated in August 2020, adding/deleting some space, hoping that readers will have a better and more correct understanding after reading it. The original article has been stored inThis way, if you are interested, you can read it.
Preface
The main reason for writing this article is because I saw another article on the website on Google Search Console at " What isbacklink" This keyword received a tiny amount of traffic (5). However, the article isis introducing the backlink analysis tool, rather than explaining what backlink is.。
Although the traffic is small, in order to better meet the search intentions of these users, I wrote this article! If you are searching for " What isbacklink" or visitors with related words, I hope you see the current article in the search results instead of the article below:
Postscript: This article was later published in " What isbacklink"Has a pretty good ranking. Find out in Search ConsoleThe website has search terms whose purpose is different from the purpose of the landing page.is a good writing and optimization direction.
SEO and website traffic
I believe that whether it is a company image website, an e-commerce website, or a blog, everyone will hope that the more traffic the website has, the better. The traffic sources of the website can be roughly divided into the following types:
- Paid Traffic:I believe everyone is familiar with spending money to have their website appear on Facebook, search results, news websites, etc.
- Organic Traffic (natural traffic): When someone searches for keywords related to your website, the traffic that comes to your website from the search results. This kind of traffic is becauseGoogle believes that your website (or web page) can achieve the purpose of the searcherThat's why it appears when someone searches for that term.
- Referral Traffic (recommended traffic): Recommended traffic comes from other websites. For example, someone shares your article on Facebook, or another blog quotes a paragraph of yours and then quotes it from a famous source...etc., etc., which all have the opportunity to attract people to your website.
- Direct Traffic: Direct traffic generally refers to traffic whose source cannot be determined. The possible consequences can be written in a large article, but usually when users directly enter the URL or bookmark the website, it will be recorded as direct traffic.
Among them, we have a lot of control over the advertising traffic (ex. budget). Referral and Direct Traffic are mostly decided by others, butOrganic Traffic is to "make Google think that your website can achieve the purpose of searchers". This is where the so-called SEO (Search Engine Optimization, search engine optimization) mainly intervenes.
Google Search Mission Statement
Thank you. I know that search engines are not limited to Google, but I am so used to using it and I am a Google fan, so in this article, the words Google and search engine will be used interchangeably. I hope everyone will not be surprised.
As the leader of search engines, Googlemission statementYes“to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. When you search for "Tainan snacks," Google will not show up a webpage for a Tainan snack shop recruiting people, or a simple food diary written by an unknown blogger. Usually, what appears on the first page of search results will be a popular blog or a high-quality webpage.
Most people will take this for granted, but a few people will ask "Why?", search engines ultimatelyis just a machine/algorithm. How does it decide which website can achieve the searcher's intent and which website is better than another website?
This involves Google’s ranking factors for ranking web pages.
Website ranking factors (Ranking Factors)
The factors that affect website ranking are called Ranking Factors or Ranking Signals. Google has said that they useMore than 200 Ranking Factors。
Google is worried about someone deliberately manipulating search results and worried about plagiarism by competitors (such as Bing). It does not disclose all the ranking factors of its own algorithm, so no one really knows exactly which factors will affect rankings. But there are some commonly recognized Ranking Factors, andOne of them is backlink。
This article focuses on the discussion of backlink. Other recognized ranking factors include web page speed, web page content, web page security, mobile version reading experience, etc.
What are Backlinks(backlink)?
Backlink in Chinese is "reverse link", which refers to "links from other websites to your website"is sometimes called "Inbound Links" in English. When I mention relevant information or quote other people's articles when writing articles, I will add a hyperlink to the other party's website so that interested readers can visit the website on their own. Such a hyperlink is a backlink for those websites.
Sometimes you will see different terms. These terms do not have absolute definitions, so if you have any doubts during communication, you may wish to ask to confirm the understanding of both parties.
- External Link or Outbound Link: Links from your website to other people’s websites
- Internal Link: Link to the same website
The impact of backlinks on website rankings
The concept of backlinks is like an academic paper;The more often a paper is cited by other papers, the higher the importance of the paper can be imagined. The two founders of Google used this principle as an important indicator of web page ranking, and then...organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful!
But of course, the importance of a paper cited by a Harvard doctoral student is definitely different from that of a Pheasant University student. Therefore, in addition to the number of backlinks, Google also gave each website a score based on the source (importance) of these backlinks.This score is called PageRank.
A brief discussion on PageRank
PageRank is a score calculated by search engines for each web page through links between web pages.. The academic paper on PageRank was first published by the two founders of Google. They later applied it to online search and created Google, which everyone knows. Thanks to this technology, Google can give better results than other search engines and gain a leading position among search engines. The calculation method of
PageRank is very complicated. You can think of this paragraph as a Good to Know and explain it with a simplified and simplified diagram below:
- page A is 0.4, because page A has a link from page C, and page C’s PageRank is 0.4 and has only one external link. The PageRank of
- page B is 0.2, because page B has a link from page A, and page A’s PageRank is 0.4 but has two external links, so each link gets 0.2 (0.4/2) The PageRank of
- page C is 0.4. Because page C has a link from page A and a link from page B, getting page A will get 0.2 points (0.4/2) plus the 0.2 points from page B.
Please remember that the above model is a very, very simplified version, " How to give the initial score of?」、「Should all links from the same web page have the same value??」、「How to calculate PageRank if a webpage links to myself?」、「How to apply the PageRank model to the huge number of entire Internet ecosystems?"...and so on, these are the complications that make the practical application of this concept.
Little knowledge: Although PageRank calculates the importance of web pages, its name comes from Larry "Page", one of the founders of Google. In addition, the derived applications of PageRank can also be seen in many fields such as machine learning or natural language.
Backlink Many = Good?
So much! Anyway, Google ranking depends on a bunch of factors, one of which is very important is backlinks. The more backlinks, the higher the ranking will be, right!?
If you are a website owner, I'm sorry that you have to read so much to see the key points... But the above conclusion is half right and half wrong. The right part has been said before, but the wrong thing is that you are not the only one who thinks this way. People who did SEO in the early days also came to this conclusion, and what they did was to go around and post comments on other people's blogs and put links to their own websites, or ask some writers to write some very low-quality articles on other websites and then put links...
As for Google, it is impossible for everyone to be so arrogant. In April 2012, Google launched an algorithm:Google Penguin is designed to combat these unnatural external links, if caught, the website traffic will be greatly reduced or even deindexed. For more details about Google Penguin, please refer to my other article.
So the conclusion is,It is important to have more backlinks, but the source quality of the backlinks is more important.Don't try to fool Google by trying to trick Google. Those unfair methods may improve the website's ranking temporarily, but it is not so easy to get over with punishment.
Method of establishing backlinks (Link Building Strategy)
The long paragraph above should have successfully explained the word Backlink, which sounds mysterious but is actually good. In addition to website architecture and content optimization, one of the important tasks of SEO work is Link Building. After all,Although the concept of backlinks is simple, it is not easy to get people to naturally mention your website and put a link there.。
In the SEO field, these methods are generally divided into Black Hat, Gray Hat, and White Hat, which are roughly bad, negotiable, and good. I will give an example of each below:
1. Black Hat link creation method
The picture below is one of Black Hat SEO's techniques. Use your own or other people's blogs to write an unknown article, stuff a few keywords into it and then hyperlink to your own website. It doesn't matter if your English is not good, because the following article has no grammar at all.
Another bad method is to leave indiscriminate comments on other people's blogs. The picture below is a ridiculous example that I accidentally saw while working on a project... 130,000 comments all looked like this.
2. Controversial gray hat strategy:
Some link building techniques are not as obvious as black hat techniques. Maybe Google has no way to judge whether the link is good or bad, but the mentality when putting the link is negotiable. I personally think that as long as it is not a link that is really helpful to website visitors, even if it is not as shameful as Black Hat, it cannot be regarded as White Hat SEO.
The picture above is what a company I have worked for is doing. When the company builds a website for a client, it will put a logo image in the footer and then connect it to the company website. As a result, the company website has a lot of backlinks, and about 2/3 of the backlinks are of this type... (See the "Images" type in the picture below)
If you put a link, but do not want the "value" of the link to be transferred to the linked web page, we can add a rel="nofollow" attribute to the link., on the one hand, it does not endorse their content, and on the other hand, it also lets Google know that my website has nothing to do with these websites. Like the link above that gives examples of black hat SEO, I put rel="nofollow".
3. White hat SEO link creation method
If you have a website and want to improve its ranking...it took you a long way to see what you really should learn. Let’s be honest, it is not easy to let others mention your website naturally, and the corresponding time and effort are indispensable.
"Content is King"， The best way to get links is to have great content first, whether it is an article or a video, it must be so good that others will want to link to your website as a quote or example when writing related articles.
The above article is from an agency.Talking about Negative Keywords in PPC, the article provides a fairly complete list of "negative keywords" for reference by all those who do keyword advertising.
This article received backlinks from 93 different websites, which can be said to be super successful. After all, the company is only a local data marketing agency in Boston with about 25 people, not a large company.
Fun fact: I joined this company in September of that year after I first wrote this article, and during the interview I mentioned “I know this article from your company is great and has lots of backlinks!"The boss was a little surprised at the moment. He probably didn't expect that a young man who came for the interview had already done a backlinks analysis on the company's website, and later successfully got the offer.
How should webmasters view backlinks with a correct attitude?
The above three classifications simply distinguish which are good and which are bad backlinks, but sometimes what some SEOs are doing is not so black and white, for example:
- The owners of the two websites have communicated in advance. I will write an article mentioning you, and you will write an article mentioning me.
- The restaurant invites food bloggers to dine for free, but they must write an article to promote the restaurant and include a link.
- Offer to write blogs for big websites, even pay them, and then insert a link to your own website in the article.
Not all the motivations for these behaviors are so bad, and not all the quality of such articles is bad, but as a marketer, you must be remindedNever do Link Building just for SEO and website ranking reasons, in fact, the word Link "Building" personally feels a bit outlandish, because it means that you care about the Link rather than the real website users.
Many SEO agencies will also use the establishment of backlinks as one of their KPIs. In addition to determining whether the source of the link is "natural", as webmasters, we should also pay attention to whether these links bring real "value" (traffic, brand exposure, etc.).
How Google views backlinks
Here are the Google Webmaster Guidelines forLink Schemeexplanation, as long as there are monetary transactions or unnatural link configurations, there is a risk of violating the guidelines, which may have a negative SEO impact on the website.
Even so, there is still considerable ambiguity in practice.What kind of connection is unnatural?」、「To what extent will you be punished?”. Google doesn’t make its review standards public because doing so would only give opportunists better guidelines.。
There’s a quote from Google’s Guide to this question, and one of my favorite quotes,If you can openly tell your opponents or Google employees what you are doing to your website, then it can be regarded as a white hat SEO link building method.。
whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee.
Google Webmaster Guidelines
Backlink query tool
I talked about backlinks before and the mentality of getting backlinks correctly.Next let’s talk about how to know what backlinks your website has.It is very important to know who has contacted you. In addition to knowing what people are saying about your company behind your back, you can also respond appropriately to both good and bad things.
If you want to see the link to your own website,The easiest and free way is to use the webmaster tools provided by search engines, the webmaster tools provided by Google and Bing are introduced below.
Google Search Console
A few simple onesSteps to certify websiteFrom now on, you can see the backlinks of your website and the linked pages in the Links on the left.
It is worth mentioning that Google will not give you all backlinks at once, only a few samples. For large websites, you can try downloading them after a period of time. Sometimes you will get different samples.
Bing Webmater Tools
In addition to Google’s webmaster tools, it can also be certifiedWebmaster Tools for Bingto get more backlinks information. Unlike Google,Bing’s webmaster tools can also analyze the source of backlinks to rival websites!
There are also some paid tools in the SEO field that can also help webmasters analyze backlinks, such asMoz Open Site Explorer, SEMrush, Ahrefs, Majestic…etc. None of these tools are cheap, but they also have other features besides backlink.Note that no tool can 100% capture all the backlinks of a website. If you really care about this information, you can use a few more methods to organize it yourself.
Conclusion
This article has been one of the main sources of traffic for my blog since it was first published in 2016, so I am very happy for your visit and congratulations on your success in getting here!!
As mentioned at the beginning of the article, I went back and made some modifications to this article in August 2020, hoping to increase its readability and provide a more correct understanding. Therefore, I sincerely hope that both SEO novices and veterans can gain something after reading it. If you have any questions about the content, need more explanation, or just want to say thank you, please feel free to ask or leave a message below to let me know! 😁
Due to personal factors, it is difficult to have as much time as before to write a comprehensive basic SEO article. But I still have a heart to share. Now I have a Facebook page. I mainly share what I have seen and heard about SEO, interesting cases or phenomena, and some knowledge sharing. Everyone is welcome to like or follow our page –digital engine!
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