Backlinks
Backlinks are an important factor in search rankings, as they display trust and authority to pages on a website. However, there are a number of best practices that need to be adhered to, including ensuring links are relevant and not seen as spam. Below, we’ve compiled a list of key takeaways and SEO best practices for backlinks from Google’s regular SEO Office Hours sessions.
For more on optimizing your website’s links for search engines check out our additional resources:
5 Internal Linking Strategies to Boost SEO and Drive Organic Traffic.
Penguin Ignores Most Links so Only Very Bad Profiles Incur a Penalty
Only sites with very bad backlink profiles are likely to see any penalty. Penguin is now mostly ignoring links rather than applying any penalty.
Location and Language Don’t Affect Backlinks
The weight of backlinks isn’t affected by the location or language of the website.
Google Penguin Devalues Links Instead of Penalising Them
The new algorithm in Penguin devalues spammy links instead of applying a penalty. Despite this, John says getting rid of disavow completely would be a bad strategy, as you can use the disavow file for any links you do not want to be associated with.
Canonicals on Shared Content to the Original Source Consolidate Authority
Canonical on Shared Content Should consolidate backlink authority on the original.
Genuine Links From Unrelated Sites are OK
A genuine recommendation link, from a website that isn’t related in content, is fine provided the recommendation is genuine, and doesn’t need to be nofollowed.
Add Internal Links to Pages with Backlinks to Pass Authority
John says it makes sense to add links from content pages with backlinks, into relevant product or category pages to pass the authority on to those pages.
New Content Will Drop Rankings Without Links
John suggests that new content may be pushed up into search results, but could get dropped to a lower position if other signals don’t appear, such as backlinks.
Use Noindex to Remove Pages from Sitelinks
If you demote Sitelinks, it just reduces their weight so they might still appear. You may have to remove the page from the index. The demotion may take ‘several’ weeks to process. If you have really bad Sitelinks which won’t disappear, but you want it to remain indexed, then you can contact them.
Fresh links increase crawling of old pages
If google see’s a new link to an old page, it’s more likely to crawl that page more frequently. So adding new links to re-activated pages should get them discovered more quickly.
Disavow Backlinks on New and Migrating Domains
If you migrate a site to a new domain which has unnatural backlinks, you should disavow the unnatural links on the new domain as well.