In the age of COVID and online shopping, everyone wants their website to get noticed. For the Search Engine Optimization field, links occupy as important a role as ever. A study by SEMRush lists various link signals as 4 of the top 8 ranking factors while Backlinka found that the average #1 Google Search has 3.8x more backlinks and 3.2x more referring domains than #2-#10. Everyone wants their website to be #1, don’t they?
Link building is still one of the most effective SEO tasks for any website to pursue. But be careful: not every link signal is a good one. In fact, Google penalizes websites they perceive as cheating at the game with doorway pages, hidden links, high volume of exact matches, and so on. Search engines don’t want to allow spam to influence rankings nor will they allow people to simply buy their way to the top. Some of these decisions are based on reputation as well; spam leads to more spam. Many poor-quality links together create a “bad neighborhood” in the virtual sphere, tanking your website’s reputation if it’s caught in the chain.
So what are good ways to increase link signals? A variety of factors exist (from domain age to length of content), but most methods boil down to two principles: maintain a high-quality website and only provide external backlinks to websites of equal or better quality. So long as your page and the external backlinks it attracts have good Expertise, Authority, and Trust (E-A-T), they will be able to climb the search rankings.
Take it from Google themselves: “Creating good content pays off . . . the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.”
What do you think? Have you found a link that is not dead? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter or Facebook. You can also comment on our MeWe page by joining the MeWe social network.
Last Updated on February 3, 2021.
