A
“backlink” is one of the most used words in the world of search engine
optimization (SEO).
Many bloggers who have only
recently started a blog or a website often struggle to understand what the
term “backlink” means.
In
this post, I hope to offer you an understanding of what backlinks are, why
they are essential to SEO, and why they are important for your online
success.
Let’s get started…
Backlinks
are incoming links to a webpage.
When
a webpage links to any other page, it’s called a backlink. In the past,
backlinks were the major metric for the ranking of a webpage. A page with
a lot of backlinks tended to rank higher on all major search engines, including
Google. This is still true to a large extent.
Here
is a glossary of common terms related to backlinks that you should know:
- Link Juice: When a webpage links to any of your
articles or your website’s homepage, it passes “link juice”. This
link juice helps with the ranking of the article, and also improves
the domain authority. As a blogger, you can
stop passing link juice by using a no-follow tag.
- No-Follow Link: When a website links to another website, but the
link has a no-follow tag, that link does
not pass link juice. No-follow links are not useful concerning
the ranking of a page as they do not contribute anything. In
general, a webmaster uses the no-follow tag when he/she is linking
out to an unreliable site.
- Example: Links from comments on other blogs.
- Do-Follow Link: By default, all the links that you add into a
blog post are do-follow links, and these pass link juice.
- Linking Root Domains: This refers to the number of backlinks coming
into your website from a unique domain. Even if a website has linked to
your website ten times, it will only be considered as one linked
root domain.
- Low-Quality Links: Low-quality links are links that come from
harvested sites, automated sites, spam sites, or even porn sites. Such
links do far more harm than good. This is one reason you
should be careful when buying backlinks.
- Internal Links: Links that are going from one page to another
within the same domain are called internal links. The process itself is
referred to as internal linkingor interlinking.
- Anchor Text: Text that is used for hyperlinks is called anchor
text. Anchor textbacklinks work great when you
are trying to rank for particular keywords.
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