Backlinks – necessary?

[Lori Waters]

Does anyone use backlinks within their blogs? 

If so, how is it beneficial and where do you get them?

Thanks

[Jessica/YDWWYW/PetTalkMedia]

Backlinks is an SEO thing. When a highly ranked/credible site links back to your blog, it increases your SEO rank (your site is seen as more credible and shows up higher in search). There is a whole industry (SEO professionals) around getting backlinks to a site. Some techniques used are shady (like paying, spam comments, tricking, etc) and some are legitimate. Google is cracking down on the shady ones. That is why there is a “nofollow” rule now – so if someone paid you to put a link on your site, SEO juice is not given to that site because it proves they have money, not that they have a site that people find valuable.

That’s the way I understand it anyway. I need to learn more about SEO.

[Nickey Rautenberg]

Hi Lori,

Back links are not something you use within your blogs – a back link would be when another website has a link to your blog. You may notice from time to time you get “comments” from Spambots on your blog from MichaelKorsBag or Coach or any type of weird business with a generic message like “This is a really great blog. Thank you for sharing this information.” and then of course they include a hyperlink to some website that is completely unrelated to your work. This is BLACK HAT back linking. This type of back linking occurs when businesses hire another company (usually a company oversees) who has a ton of servers or a ton of workers who can spam blogs across the internet in order to ‘up their back links’.

While back links hold weight in SEO, you should really focus on your overall digital strategy and obtaining back links from other websites to your site in a WHITE HAT fashion. This black hat way does produce results in terms of bumping you up on search engines but buyer beware this is temporary! It can even get you banned from Google. This style of obtaining back links is actually one of the main reasons why Google is now in the practice of changing it’s algorithm more often – in order to weed out back links & other non-organic practices from black hat online marketers and spambots. This is part of “off-page SEO”.

To answer your questions how is it beneficial: essentially a back link can be looked at as someone enjoying your material and by linking from their site to yours, they are giving you credit. Google recognizes this credit and weighs it out versus your competitors on the search engine results page. Back linking is just a part of gaining a high ranking however. Other things weighted are domain age, keyword density, overall relevance to the search topic, your meta tags (title tags as well as category tagging), whether or not your material is authentic ie. not duplicate content, the overall layout and usability of your site and blog, how many directory listings your site is on (*this is an easy, white hat way to create organic back links for yourself FYI), your actual URL & actually a whole variety of factors. It is a serious combinations of on-page SEO as well as off. 

If you are practicing SEO honestly and organically, back links will come. Provided that you are giving your audience valuable content that they enjoy of course. Back links can come in the form of links to your website being shared on social media, one person’s blog or website linking to yours, someone quoting you as a resource, directories (as mentioned above) and developing positive relationships with your readers and fellow bloggers which encourages one another to share each others material. Though this method takes longer than the black hat practice, over time you will see some positive authentic results. 

In the meantime in you can grow your audience and your search engine rank by focusing on your digital strategy and using keywords properly to drive traffic from search engines. On page SEO focuses on keyword in title of blog, keyword in URL of blog, keyword in your description, keyword in header, and of course keywords throughout your content. Per piece of content, pick one or two keywords you’d like to show up for when someone is searching online and use those words throughout your upcoming piece. Over time people will start to find you via search engines, use your content, and share or back link to you because you’ve provided them with something valuable. 

There is a LOT to talk about in this area so if you have any questions or if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out to me directly: nickey@goseocialmarketing.com

[Lori Waters]

Makes sense. Do bloggers typically backlink to other bloggers content or do they just bypass it for the most part? I don’t do backlinking but if it’s something I should work on then I guess I should get started on it as I do want to rank highly on google for my small business. But I’m starting to think that maybe it may not be as important as I’ve been doing just fine up to this point without it. 

Jessica/YDWWYW/PetTalkMedia said:

Backlinks is an SEO thing. When a highly ranked/credible site links back to your blog, it increases your SEO rank (your site is seen as more credible and shows up higher in search). There is a whole industry (SEO professionals) around getting backlinks to a site. Some techniques used are shady (like paying, spam comments, tricking, etc) and some are legitimate. Google is cracking down on the shady ones. That is why there is a “nofollow” rule now – so if someone paid you to put a link on your site, SEO juice is not given to that site because it proves they have money, not that they have a site that people find valuable.

That’s the way I understand it anyway. I need to learn more about SEO.

[Lori Waters]

Thank you for your reply! Definitely cleared up some questions on the subject! 

Nickey Rautenberg said:

Hi Lori,

Back links are not something you use within your blogs – a back link would be when another website has a link to your blog. You may notice from time to time you get “comments” from Spambots on your blog from MichaelKorsBag or Coach or any type of weird business with a generic message like “This is a really great blog. Thank you for sharing this information.” and then of course they include a hyperlink to some website that is completely unrelated to your work. This is BLACK HAT back linking. This type of back linking occurs when businesses hire another company (usually a company oversees) who has a ton of servers or a ton of workers who can spam blogs across the internet in order to ‘up their back links’.

While back links hold weight in SEO, you should really focus on your overall digital strategy and obtaining back links from other websites to your site in a WHITE HAT fashion. This black hat way does produce results in terms of bumping you up on search engines but buyer beware this is temporary! It can even get you banned from Google. This style of obtaining back links is actually one of the main reasons why Google is now in the practice of changing it’s algorithm more often – in order to weed out back links & other non-organic practices from black hat online marketers and spambots. This is part of “off-page SEO”.

To answer your questions how is it beneficial: essentially a back link can be looked at as someone enjoying your material and by linking from their site to yours, they are giving you credit. Google recognizes this credit and weighs it out versus your competitors on the search engine results page. Back linking is just a part of gaining a high ranking however. Other things weighted are domain age, keyword density, overall relevance to the search topic, your meta tags (title tags as well as category tagging), whether or not your material is authentic ie. not duplicate content, the overall layout and usability of your site and blog, how many directory listings your site is on (*this is an easy, white hat way to create organic back links for yourself FYI), your actual URL & actually a whole variety of factors. It is a serious combinations of on-page SEO as well as off. 

If you are practicing SEO honestly and organically, back links will come. Provided that you are giving your audience valuable content that they enjoy of course. Back links can come in the form of links to your website being shared on social media, one person’s blog or website linking to yours, someone quoting you as a resource, directories (as mentioned above) and developing positive relationships with your readers and fellow bloggers which encourages one another to share each others material. Though this method takes longer than the black hat practice, over time you will see some positive authentic results. 

In the meantime in you can grow your audience and your search engine rank by focusing on your digital strategy and using keywords properly to drive traffic from search engines. On page SEO focuses on keyword in title of blog, keyword in URL of blog, keyword in your description, keyword in header, and of course keywords throughout your content. Per piece of content, pick one or two keywords you’d like to show up for when someone is searching online and use those words throughout your upcoming piece. Over time people will start to find you via search engines, use your content, and share or back link to you because you’ve provided them with something valuable. 

There is a LOT to talk about in this area so if you have any questions or if anyone has any questions feel free to reach out to me directly: nickey@goseocialmarketing.com

[Paul Mather – Snowdog Guru]

Hi Lori,

There are 2 types of links, internal and external.

Internal
An internal link is for example your navigation. It’s good practice to interlink articles when applicable. For example if you’re writing a blog post on grooming and you mention the Furminator and you’ve previously written a blog post on the Furminator, you can then link to that blog post.

External
External links are of course when another blog links to either your homepage or one of your articles. External links are still one of the biggest ranking factors in the major search engines, however the rules have changed significantly over the years.

The practice of actively obtaining links to your blog is called link building and it can be risky unless you really know what you’re doing. If you build links too quickly, get them from non reputable sources, too many link exchanges, overuse of specific keywords in the anchor tag etc etc.

The best strategy for somebody who isn’t well versed in SEO, is to focus on creating great content and use social media to share your content, build your audience and network with other like minded bloggers.

I hope that helps a little.

Paul

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