Are all backlinks made equal?
Backlinks are also known as 'inbound links', 'incoming links' or 'one way links'. They are links between one website to another page on another website. Google, bing, baidu and all other major search engines consider backlinks like votes, from a certain point of view. Pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have higher organic traffic from search engine by getting a better ranking in the search results. But are all backlinks made equal? Of course not... and it's the same thing in the real world : some people's voice has more impact than others, right?It doesn’t take long when dealing with SEO to realize that not all links are created equally, and that some backlinks are worth of a great deal in terms of power juice than others. In short, a backlink from a trusted domain with a high trustflow, authority and citation flow is worth much more than a link from a website with lower pagerank. It's the exact same thing: it will get you alot more exposure if the president talks about your website than if I do, right? This is why it is alot more efficient to spend time getting a few quality backlinks than having a thousand ones of lower quality. This is why it is important, when you are building your backlink campaign, to use online tools to get the trust, authority and citation rank of the websites you will publish your link on. There are several free and paid tools on the internet, use them to know other website's metrics and have an idea if their backlinks are worth the efforts. But that is not all! You must keep in mind that backlinks from websites that are relevant to your own niche or industry tend to be stronger. For example, if you have a website about fitness, a backlink from a reputable fitness blog or website would be more valuable than one from a cooking website. The placement of the link within the content also matters. Backlinks embedded within the body of a relevant article or blog post are generally stronger than those in footers, sidebars, or author bios. The anchor text (the clickable text of the link) should be relevant to the content it's linking to. Natural anchor text that includes keywords related to your content is preferable. Over-optimized anchor text or spammy anchor text can indicate a weak backlink. Backlinks from websites that receive high traffic and engagement are typically stronger. Websites with active user bases and regular traffic are more likely to pass on authority through their backlinks. Contextual backlinks are those embedded within the context of the content. These tend to be stronger than links placed in unrelated or isolated locations on a webpage. At last, keep in mind the importance of a diverse backlink profile consisting of links from various domains, including different types of websites (blogs, forums, news sites, etc.), is considered stronger than one with backlinks from a single source or type of website. All these factors have an impact when it comes to rank your websites in search engines and must be considered.
But there is one more detail... The quest for backlinks would not be completed without a short explanation of the difference between “follow” and “nofollow” backlinks. The concept of dofollow and nofollow backlinks came shortly after the explosive growth of blogs, where visitors could leave comments on the articles or comment and could leave a link pointing back to their website. Commenting usually involves leaving a name, email address, the comment text, and, like a pot of gold sitting under the rainbow waiting for you: a website backlink! The original intention of letting blog users leaving a link on their comment form, was to reward those who took the time to interact with the blog itself, with a backlink pointing to their website. It seemed like a fair exchange, right? Sadly, this was seen as a great opportunity by internet spammers to leave no quality comments everywhere they possibly could, with a multitude of backlinks then pointing back to their website. To avoid this kind of easy spam technique, Google and the blogging world quickly responded to this with the introduction of the “nofollow” attribute on most of the outgoing links of the comment sections of blogs.
But what are dofollow and nofollow backlinks anyway? A no follow link is a link that does not count as a point in the page’s favor, and it does not boost pagerank directly. On the other hand, a website/page with 100% dofollow inbound backlinks can be considered as suspicious for the google's search engine crawlers and other analytic tools. This is why it is important to get a reasonable ratio of dofollow and nofollow backlinks that can be considered as 'natural' from the eyes of the crawlers.
From now, I hope you understand the importance of choosing the right place to publish your URLs links. Choose quality over quantity and make sure you have a reasonable dofollow/nofollow ratio and act as natural as possible. One last thing to consider is Outbound Backlink (OBL) ratio. If you found a realy strong webpage to publish your link on but this page already points to more than 1000 other websites, consider you will be splitting the 'power juice' with all of these 1000 other links. Also, if all of your backlinks comes from these kind of 'spamy' websites, this could be considered as suspicious. Still, these webpages can be used for 3rd tiers backlinks in the purpose of attracting search engine's attention to your 2nd tiers ones but for now, I think you get the concept... act natural!
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