Backlinking Explained

What is Backlinking

Backlinking Explained

This is a basic explanation of backlinking for people who are new to Internet Marketing and want to know what backlinking is.

Backlinking is just one of the many things that can help your site get to page 1. If you do it right you will get there sooner. Backlinks occur when another website hyperlinks to your website, either through a profile link or a forum post (a link back to your site) or is placed on the site itself, like a link on a blog post. You see hyperlinks all the time. They are blue underlined links like https://backlinksonsteroids.com. When that hyperlink takes you to another website, it is called a backlink. It links back to your site.

Article marketing is also used to backlink. There is debate as whether or not Google is getting away from that. Watch the video on the home page on this site. Many sites were tanked by Google when the Google Penguin algorithm hit. That is because many of the articles placed on directories were poor quality content or copied content. Google considered the article directories as link farms and not something that was bringing quality to the visitor. Blog networks were also hit hard. Blog networks were built by webmasters to create mid to high PR blogs that could be used to get high quality backlinks. These are also considered to be link farms by Google. When the links farms got devalued or deindexed the backlinks that were on the either lost all their ‘link juice’ or became non-existent. That in turn crashed the positions of the keywords and many people lost money. Be careful when using article marketing for your backlinks.

When backlinking you should pay attention to page rank. Google indexes websites. That means Google ‘recognizes’ that the website exists and then pays attention to it by sending it’s robots to crawl your site and read your contents on a regular basis. Google gives every site it indexes a Page Rank number of 0 through 10. To Google this means how important the site is. Think of backlinking by page rank as the cumulative grade point average received in school. A Page Rank of PR0 to PR1 is like a failing grade, a Page Rank of 2 is like a D grade, a Page Rank of 3-4 is like a C grade, a 6-7 is like a B grade, and PR9 and PR10 an A. So just like in school a bunch of F’s (PR0-1) will bring down your grade point average. The more links you have on PR3 to PR10 sites the better.
It takes time for a website to achieve a higher page rank and you must be updating your content and have original and relevant content in order to get a higher page rank. Higher page rank also helps with the placement of your keywords on page one. Every three months or so Google will send out it’s special robots to evaluate a site in order to give it a ‘grade’ (Page Rank). There is a Google utility that you can place in your search engine home page that will show you the page rank of the website you are visiting. You can also use different free programs on the Internet to see what page rank your site or the site you are visiting has.

Google is of the mindset that if a site with a high PR links back to your site, your site must be very good and deserve a higher position in the search results. Backlinks that are created on high page rank (PR) sites are given a higher ‘grade’. That means one high PR backlink is worth 1,000 PR 0-2 backlinks. You will find that some people will create thousands of backlinks for their site, not knowing that a few high PR backlinks would do more good.

You will find that backlinks from .com domains, .org and .net are found on page one. You will not see many .info or .co. Backlinks from .mil, .edu, and .gov backlinks used to be given a lot more link juice. Now they are about the same as .com, .org and .net depending on the site. If your website domain is a .info or .co it will be harder for you to rank in the top 10.

There are also dofollow and nofollow backlinks. Dofollow hyperlinks tell the search engine bots to follow the link to it’s destination. Nofollow hyperlinks tell the bots not to follow the link. It is a good idea, if you are affiliate marketing to make the links to the affiliate site nofollow on your site. It is also a good idea to have more dofollow backlinks than nofollow.

You can create backlinks in many different ways. You can do profile backlinking and forum and blog commenting. When you sign up to post on a forum, all the information you give about yourself and your website is called a Profile. A Profile Backlink may be created when you enter in your information. When you comment post to the forum it can create a backlink for you too. Be aware that profile links and comment posts do not always create backlinks. This is because the website you post to can be either meta do-follow or meta no-follow. It is up to the webmaster as to whether it is do-follow or no-follow. Some forums and blogs are no-follow. So your profile and any comments/posts you make will not create a backlink for you. Other forums are do-follow, so your profile information and forum posts become backlinks. When a forum or blog has a high page rank the backlinks coming from that site are given more weight.

Profile links that have been approved either by the moderator or through auto-approval, last longer than forum comments and article marketing backlinks. Profile backlinks keep their, what is called, link juice. They stay around as long as the website they are created on stays around.

You should be aware that many times the webmaster will decide whether or not to approve profiles and comments on his blog or forum. This can take many days or even weeks. The webmaster could also at some point delete a comment or profile.

Webmasters can also decide to make the blog or forum ‘auto-approved’. This means that all profiles created on his/her site will automatically be approved. So when you create a profile on an auto-approved site, the profile backlink will show up right away.

Once backlinks are created you can check and see your backlinks by using online backlink checkers. Be aware however that not all your backlinks will show up. Yahoo shows the most but does not show all of them. Google hardly shows any at all. This is actually to protect you from your competitors. If your competitors can see the backlinks you are using they can just link to them and create them for themselves. Just be aware that once backlinks are pinged, the search engines will index them.

When choosing backlinks you will also want to choose one-way backlinks. One way links are one way inbound links from mid to high PR sites to your money site. Google sees the one way links as the best. It used to be that two-way links were the best with websites mutually linking to each other. But there was much abuse and Google changed it’s algorithm and punishes sites that have many of these. Though a few won’t hurt if they are beneficial to traffic to your site.

Backlinking is very time consuming and sometimes frustrating. If you don’t have time to do this yourself and would rather build other websites instead, you can hire a service like Backlinks On Steroids to do the backlinking for you. There are also software programs for purchase that will create backlinks for you. But be extremely careful which ones you choose. Google wants an even playing field, does not like cheaters, and wants the best sites on the first page. Last I heard, Google has 500-600 algorithms that it uses to evaluate sites. One of these looks for what is called footprints.

Footprints are any trails that show Google that the task that has been accomplished, such as comments, content, or backlinks, have not been created manually. Google wants a level playing field for everyone. It considers using software to do the job, cheating, putting others at a disadvantage. You want everything manually created or looking like it has been created manually. Otherwise you risk having the site whacked or de-indexed. So if you are considering using software for repeat tasks, be very careful. You could be putting the site at risk.

An example of a backlinking technique that leaves footprints is closed profile linkwheels. These linkwheels are 2 or more hyperlinked keywords are used in profile links and link to each other and your site. I have had customers come to me who have had their sites punished after purchasing closed profile linkwheels. They used to be very popular. Stay away from using them.

When backlinking make sure that you include a balanced backlinks with a varied percentage of anchor text and types of backlinks. Google want natural backlinks. We supply balanced backlinking.

Authored by: Joan Wardzala – SEO Specialist in vertical and horizontal search engines – Google+

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