Hey everybody!
Hope everyone is doing great as they find this blog post.
In this post I want to delve into some techie SEO stuff. Many newbies would have no idea what this is, and of course I want to make sure that my site has a great deal of technical value in addition to the marketing that I conduct. Whether you are an online marketer or not, you NEED to know this stuff. Do I know everything? No not by a long shot, but I am learning all of the time and I put it down on screen for those who maybe don’t know. So, if this helped you or you found it interesting, share it out and comment below too. Like my FaceBook page to the right and add me to your Google+ circles.
So let’s get going, and read on to learn about backlinks.
We’re Going to Get Into Your Head and Show You What are Backlinks and How Important They are to Your Website Search Rank
I wanted to get into explaining what are backlinks.
Okay so what is a backlink? Well, backlinks are links placed on another website back to your site. They can be to your home page or to one of your internal pages. The type of link matters too. There are two kinds of links, and of course Google invented them. They didn’t invent hyperlinks but they did invent this. Let me explain. Originally there were just hyperlinks, which were regular links from one page or site to another, just like we have today. When the search engines’ spider or crawler “bot” programs crawl the internet from one page to another, and one site to the next, indexing these things for the search engine database, they “follow” the link from one page to another.
Normal links are also known as “dofollow” links, because those links give up some “link juice” to the target site. They are like a vote for the page or site they are linking to. It’s as if the webmaster creating the links is saying, “I really like this linked to page or site – you should go check it out”, or, “this page really helped me with my research or in composing my own page and I found it so useful that I want to link to it.” So, the search engines interpret that as a popularity vote. That popularity vote lends some authority to the linked to resource.
It used to be that every link was a dofollow link, and of course spammers and other people who were creating thin content for profit were getting lots of rank for things as simple as posting a comment to a popular site or something like that. Google didn’t like this and figured it could strengthen the dofollow vote system by creating another type of link called a “nofollow” link, which was a link but it doesn’t lend authority or leak “link juice” to the target site. So, if a site makes all of their comments nofollow or other links nofollow, they reserve their votes for links that they leave as dofollow. So, you see, Google invented the nofollow link.
A dofollow link is just syntaxed out in the code like a regular hyperlink. So, by default, every link is dofollow, just as before Google came and changed things. You have to explicitly make a link nofollow, or, in the case of blog software, use a plugin or some other automation to make all links of a certain type as nofollow by default.
The difference between dofollow and a nofollow link code:
See how easy it is? WordPress creates links as regular dofollow links. Unless you use a plugin that turns every contextual link into a nofollow link, (and I advise against it) you must go into the code of the post and add the rel=”nofollow” to the link.
Why do I advise against blanket nofollow links? Because Google frowns upon sites hoarding their link juice. You should have a mix of dofollow and nofollow outbound links. It’s just a good SEO practice.
So What are Backlinks to My Site’s Future Growth?
Remember what I said above about “link juice” and authority? Whenever a site with a high authority – there are page and domain authority, and in the past it was page rank – but the page authority and page rank of the site giving the link will boost a lesser site with the dofollow link. Remember, nofollow links are still links and can benefit with visitors and such, but the dofollow is what matter for SEO and raising your own authority so that you rank well in the search engines.
The higher the score matters too. For example, one dofollow link from a PR6 site is worth about 2000 links from a PR0 or PR1 site. It’s like the real popular kid in school taking his arm around the new kid who has no credibility and saying something like, “He’s cool. He’s with me. I like what he has to offer. You should too.” Of course that adds prestige to your site in the search engines’ eyes and you get rewarded for that with more authority and if you get enough of these links then your rankings for your keywords goes way up.
It’s quite a simple concept, no?
What are Backlinks Sources for me to Use?
The next logical question that you must be wondering is that since i just sold you on needing backlinks, where do you get them? There are different varieties of backlinks, mainly differentiated by their quality. You may be saying, “Wait a minute, Tom, you just said there were 2 types, dofollow and nofollow, now you’re telling us there’s more?”
Well, not exactly like that.
I mean how Google rates or judges the quality of your dofollow links.
Let me explain.
How do you think that Google would rate a backlinks from a medium to high PR source that they figure out you easily obtained yourself by placing it yourself vs someone else from that higher PR site liking your content well enough to place a link back to your site without any obvious input from you?
Follow me? Are ya feelin it?
It makes sense, though, doesn’t it?”
Remember how we mentioned the popularity contest and the popular kid taking the new kid under his wing and telling the world that the new kid was okay and should be checked out? Yeah, that’s it. Google differentiates dofollow links that people place for their own sites vs those that are placed by the third party.
Third party dofollow backlinks are the kind that Google respects and values.
Following from that, Google frowns so much on people buying backlinks or engaging in link getting schemes that if they somehow detect this from your site, you can get sandboxed or deindexed completely, so be very careful how you are acquiring links for your pages.
If you are somehow notified by Google that you are in violation of their TOS in this manner, you can remove unnatural links that you control, or you can use their disavow tool to remove questionable backlinks that you do not control from your site and resubmit after you think you’ve fixed the issue. There is more about the disavow process from Google on their support site. It’s always a guessing game though since they don’t tell you what the offending links actually are.
This whole process of assessing sites for unnatural links is carried out first by the algorithm and then later by an actual team called the Webspam Team, headed by someone, as of the writing of this article, named Matt Cutts. Matt Cutts is like the Federal Reserve Chairman of Internet Webpam and Google Backlinks TOS enforcement. He has to carefully craft his statements because every syllable is analyzed for hidden meaning and nuance as to what direction Google is taking regarding this. Of course this is to be expected when this guy and his team have so much power and can literally mean the life and death of a website.
If they deindex you, your site is dead. Since Google is the largest search engine and provides most (all, really) of the web traffic, not being in their index or being way down due to a penalty is the kiss of death to a website, especially one that the owner relies on for income.
So, the moral of this story is, BE CAREFUL!
It sucks, but that’s the story, and you want me to tell it to ya straight.
Let me know your opinion on this stuff below and check out my other posts that are linked all of the place.
This stuff is VERY important for anyone trying to make sure that their site ranks well in the search engines so I hope that you thought it had value and was clear and easy to understand.
See ya next time.
Your blogging buddy….
