Govind Agarwal — January 14, 2017 Follow @submitedge
Almost all SEO guys with a thick black glass and a cool t-shirt will tell you that backlinks are important. The more the number, the better the ranking. Just then, another man comes in with a neatly parted hair and classy specs and warns you now about low-quality huge number of backlinks. In the end, you sit with your website, all confused as to what should be that magic number!
On top that that, there are issues about anchor texts, blog comments, in-page links and a whole of other SEO issues. A wrong advice can take your perfect website downhill for no fault in your technicalities. To prevent such a mishap, here are 4 back-linking boxes that you need to tick to reach the magic number and ignore whatever other stories you may hear about these.
1. Links of every quality matter
Let’s talk about Google crawler first before explaining what I just wrote. At the end of the day, Google is ultimately a program. Few lines of codes (I am under-exaggerating here) framed to crawl through links and check their existence. If it finds a hit, crawler increases its count by one.
Can it differ a quality site from a normal one? To some extent but not totally. In simple words, if your site has 5 top-quality links and your competitor has 2 along with 10 average quality ones, Google will rank you lower than your rival. The crawler will see the count as long as things are kept relevant.
2. “No follow” tag do count
Now you may definitely argue – how is this possible? It’s like, you are asking Google’s crawler not to look at the links that you tag with “no follow,” yet it will help you rank? Well, how can we judge what the algorithm thinks or does but stats have shown that sites with a considerable amount of no-follows have ranked pretty well.
So, if you are getting links that are relevant to your content to some extent, trying using “no-follow” instead of disavowing. Do not keep every link that you receive as Penguin does not like to scroll through over-optimized pages.
3. Link to one page help all
Yes, you do not need a link to every page of your site. Think like this – if a user is driven to your blog section, through some incoming link, and finds your service and content convincing, won’t he/she stick around to check the other pages out?
And this where most people miss out. You will simply over-optimize your page by creating links everywhere and lose rankings unnecessarily. Focus on good content and a user-friendly site – bounce rate factors will come in to save your low-links ordeal.
4. Your mentions need links
Do not sit back and stay happy just because somebody somewhere has mentioned your name on the internet. This, my friend, will never boost your site. Google is not that smart yet to relate your name with your web page. It will treat your mention as a simple text and totally ignore your page’s existence.
So, call up the people using your name and ask them to link. Even bio-links come in handy as these are generally decent content with a moderate number of traffic. Be it blog posts or forums, direct that link to your site (Again, keep relevance in mind).
And all these are based on stats and facts. Of course, Google will never tell us what to follow and what not to, but you can stay on these lines and work your way up the ladder. The truth is – there is no magic number! Get as many backlinks as you can, filter them regularly and check for relevance. This way, you stay ahead in the game and hover in that safe zone against Google’s “ban hammer.”
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