Here is a quick guide to answer the most frequently asked questions about Link Building.

What are Backlinks?

Backlinks in your webpage are all those websites that have inserted a link to one or more of your website pages.

Why and when receiving Backlinks is important

There are more than 200 ranking factors Google considers to evaluate a website.

Ranking criterias such as loading speed, structure or users behaviour on a website are among the fundamental ones, for instance.

Considered Internet structure and how Google scans the web, Backlinks are one of the most important factors you need to keep in mind if you wish to increase your position in the search engine.

Obviously, if your e-commerce has not received any on-site SEO optimizations, even acquiring many Backlinks will not make any difference.

If you are not an expert check SEO On-Site webpage or contact me to receive an SEO quote.

Why are Backlinks important to Google?

Why are Backlinks so important to Google rankings?

Try to imagine Google as a net made of different knots, connected to each other through links.

Knots with the highest number of connections are considered the most important ones as the data exchange within them is extremely high. Google shares the very same view of the web, especially with regards to a website internal Link Building.

For external connections, the situation gets more complicated.

The SEM Rush Factory Ranking Study is an annual survey published by SEM Rush experts (a well-known tool for web marketing) focused on the evaluation of Google’s main ranking factors.

Long story short, 600.000 search queries have been analyzed to detect Backlinks influence in the first 100 pages of each query. Here is what they have discovered about Backlinks numbers:

• Websites best positioned in SERP are also those with the highest number of Backlinks.
• Websites with a good ranking in the most popular keyword (as in those keywords with the highest volume of searches) are those with the highest number of Backlinks.
• Domains with a good ranking in high volume keywords have 3 times Backlinks than other domains that rank for low volume keywords.
• The lower is the volume of a keyword, the lower is the number of Backlinks for well-positioned websites.

This study makes clear that Backlinks are extremely important if you wish to earn a good position with high volume search keywords, as this is a highly competitive space.

How to Backlinks

There are two different ways to earn Backlinks:

1. Link Earning
2. Link Building

Earning Backlinks through Link Earnings

Link Earning consists of creating high quality and impactful contents that can be shared from other websites.

Contents may differ from one to another:

• Tutorials
• Market researches
• Viral marketing campaigns

This kind of content can be shared via social networks or by sending press releases to online newspapers.

Disadvantages of Link Earning

• There is no control over the Anchor Texts that will be inserted in the articles
• There is no control over the number of Backlinks that will be received

Earning Backlinks through Link Building

As previously mentioned, Link Building consists of creating and publishing contents for reliable websites.

In this case, there is full control over the inserted Anchor as it is very effective if you wish to improve your SERP ranking for specific keywords.

Can you get penalized by Google by using Link Building?

Google’s algorithm has evolved, allowing to instantly evaluate whether a link is artificial or not, or if users find it useful or not.

If a link is both considered artificial and not useful for its users, the backlink is not taken into account for a SERP improvement and it is consequently ignored from the algorithm.

If you receive many low-quality links, you might be penalized. This is the reason why it is highly recommended to ask Link Building professionals for assistance.

Parameters to consider to better evaluate Backlinks quality

A high-quality website is considered reliable by Google.

Most reliable websites are those that receive the highest amount of traffic from search engines for the Keywords they compete for.

Furthermore, the more reliable a website is, the more influential it will be as a Backlink. Your website improvements will be more sensitive in the SERP ranking as well.

Imagine you have to choose some websites to be used as Backlinks, how do you know which ones are the most reliable?

If your answer is: “I will analyze every website using an SEO tool” you are on the right path, but it is not that easy.

Actually, you will need to use several specific SEO tools and you will have to know very well how to use each one of them. You will also need to carry an empirical analysis of the website along with its functions and send queries to Google using specific commands.

Let’s take a look at the first step.

Traffic and Backlinks main Keywords Analysis

If you have compared analysis carried out with different SEO tools to analyze a website traffic, you might have noticed that results often differ.

That is because it can be really hard to analyze traffic on a website that has no direct access to Google Search Console.

SEO Tools currently available can only estimate the amount of website traffic that comes from the search engines.

This estimate comes from the website’s ability to place its keywords in Google’ s SERP and from the monthly volume of those Keywords search.

For instance, if a website is at the top position when you search the query “chicken”, which counts around 1000 searches per month, that website will receive 50% of 1000 views, which is 500 for many of the SEO tools in the market.

Traffic percentage depends on the SERP position and its value differs from one tool to another, as for keywords traffic volume per month. These values are based on estimates that sometimes, for some other types of keywords, can be less or more approximate. The same happens for keywords Brand and for keywords related to temporary trends.

Keywords Brand

Keywords brand, as in keywords referring to companies brands, are not included in the above parameters.

For instance, many editorial websites are well located because of the keywords brands of other companies. In these cases, tools will identify traffic for those keywords, but it doesn’t have to be necessarily true.

If a user searches for an e-commerce brand, is he looking for an article about that or is he trying to access that specific e-commerce?

“Lazy” users often prefer to type just the name of the brand instead of the full domain.

Their aim usually is to access the e-commerce. In most cases, they just ignore any other results and click on the first one coming up, which corresponds to the e-commerce address.

Therefore, if we analyze a website in third place with a keyword Brand of 100.000 searches per month, the tool will calculate 25% of viewings from this keyword, which is 25.000 viewings per month. A result that, most likely, is not correct.

A different story is for keywords brand of a website that is being considered as Backlink. In this case, the monthly volume of searches can give you an idea of Brand Awareness and of the direct traffic arriving to the website.

Keywords related to temporary trends

Some Keywords success lasts for a very limited time. Soon after this period, their search volume drastically reduces until it vanishes or starts being irrelevant.

Unfortunately, SEO tools often are not updated in a timely manner, causing a change in the Keywords volume and consequently evaluation mistakes. Therefore, it can be sometimes useful to check Google Trends as well.

Websites with duplicate content

Websites with duplicate content have to be discarded for two different reasons:

1. Google penalizes websites with duplicate content.
2. If you publish a new article on a website with duplicate content, Google might not consider it and treat it as a duplicate.

If you wish to know more about it, please check Google’s guide on Thin content with little or no added value.

Outbound links

Outbound links from a website are another important parameter you need to consider. It is important to evaluate:

• which domains are linked
• if those links give you further information about the articles
• if a massive amount of links has been inserted to improve one or more websites ranking position

Spam

Among outbound links you might also find unwanted links, created by hackers (or crackers) that the web owner is not even aware of.

Unfortunately in this case the website needs to be discarded.

Which tools to use for better analyzing Backlinks?

As previously explained, all SEO tools can give you an approximate value of a website quality and none of them is 100% reliable.

Best thing to do is to analyze the website using as many tools as possible in order to have a better idea of its quality.

Traffic analysis tools

Tools I usually use to analyze traffic from search engines are:

• SEO Zoom: traffic evaluation is based on keywords search volume and their position in Google ranks. It includes Zoom Authority as well, a metric based on the generic quality of the website.
• SEM Rush: it works the same as SEO Zoom. Search volumes often differ though.
• Alexa Rank: the score it gives you is based on a global and national scale. It also makes an estimate of the traffic percentage coming from the main keywords. Evaluation of users behaviour data is very interesting as well, such as: bounce rate, daily number of pages viewed and time spent on the website.
• Search Metrics: among other things, it shows the website visibility, as in how and how much the website is present on the search engines.

To evaluate a website quality it is important to compare data obtained from using different tools.

According to the tools, it is also essential to analyze which keywords increase your traffic, in order not to make any of the mistakes I previously mentioned.

It is also important to verify that keywords providing most traffic are in line with those the website should have according to its topic.

Tools to analyze the Backlink profile

These tools scrape Backlinks of a specific website. They both show the number of linked domains and Referring IPs. They can be really useful to search websites anomalies and to analyze your competitors:

• AHREFS
• Magestiq

Tools to analyze duplicate content

Tools I use to check if a website has duplicate content are:

• Google: you just need to copy some parts of the website content and paste them on the search engine to find out if a website has duplicate content. If the website you are analyzing comes up first, that means the content is not a duplicate.
• Siteliner: this tool analyzes all contents of a website and reveals the percentage of duplicate content, unique or shared with other websites.
• Copyscape: it is a useful tool to check if contents have been plagiarized

Tools to check if a website is part of a network

According to SEM Rush analysis, it is important to have a very varied backlink profile, both in terms of referring domains and referring IPs.

The tools below show if a website shares its IP with other pages:

• SpyOnWeb
• Reverse IP Domain Check from YouGetSignal

Using these tools you will be able to check whether the website you are analyzing shares its IP with a backlink you have already acquired.

SPAM checking tools

You can check SPAM on your website in two different ways, and they both consist into looking for the most common keywords used by spammers, such as viagra, casino, sex etc…

To run these checks you can use:

• AHRFS: check in the outbound links section the above Keywords.
• Google: check the above Keywords using Google “site:” command.

Tools providing a website quality ranking

• Domain Authority from Moz
• Zoom Authority from SEO Zoom
• Magestiq
• LTR Power Trust from Link Research Tool

Other checks

• On Google: verify when your website was last crawled by Google using the “cache” command.
• Search the website on Archive,org to check if the website is new and how it has evolved
• It is also important to find articles with links that might have been published after they were paid and check their quality, the link insert mode and in which categories they have been inserted.

What type of Backlink to acquire

It would be ideal to create a very much varied and “natural” backlink profile. Along with having both high and medium quality backlinks from every type of website, both generic and vertical ones.

If you choose me as your Link Building campaign manager, I will get different types of backlinks for you to make your e-commerce backlink profile as varied and natural as possible.

News Websites

News websites are focused on different types of topics, such as news related to a city or to a whole country. In these websites, you can find different categories as follow up of many different topics, according to the category involved.

Is location important?

Location is not essential when choosing a generic website as Backlink. While it is important that the publication of content is both in line with the website publishing it and the one to be linked.

Vertical Websites

Getting backlinks from websites specialized in the same niche as yours is extremely important and search of these websites has to be extra careful.

Search of these vertical websites can be really challenging for three main reasons:

Websites interested in specific niches are often not so many and also of poor quality

Vertical websites of your niche market compete for the very same words of your own website. Therefore, it is very unlikely that they will allow you to insert a link with an Anchor that belongs to the group of Keywords of their own projects.

Some vertical websites are just decoys created to insert adverts. Links from this type are utterly useless.

Vertical Websites

Getting backlinks from websites specialized in the same niche as yours is extremely important and search of these websites has to be extra careful.

Search of these vertical websites can be really challenging for three main reasons:

1. Websites interested in specific niches are often not so many and also of poor quality
2. Vertical websites of your niche market compete for the very same words of your own website. Therefore, it is very unlikely that they will allow you to insert a link with an Anchor that belongs to the group of Keywords of their own projects.
3. Some vertical websites are just decoys created to insert adverts. Links from this type are utterly useless.

Getting links from network websites

Websites that belong to the same network do usually share the IP along with the Google Analytics account. These parameters are easy to observe through SpyOnWeb.

It is better not to publish, in a short period of time, more than one article containing a link to your website on other pages if they belong to the same network.

Directory links

From a ranking point of view, directory links do not have much value. Although, it is always good to be linked from the most popular ones.

Hidden links

Google doesn’t like hidden links, so it is better not to have any.

Hidden links are not beneficial to users, therefore they are being inserted just to improve the SERP ranking.

Link Building Articles

The best way to make your e-commerce receive a link from another website, is to make it publish an article that contains a link to your own website.

Banners or pictures are not included, as they only have promotional purposes and Google does not consider them to improve its ranking.

Therefore, the mentioned article has to be beneficial to its users and in line with topics that are usually published from the chosen Backlink website. With regards to the articles, it is my job to find the best topics and anchor text for my clients.

I always make sure links are being inserted in the most varied and natural way, to avoid any recurrences of the same patterns. To better limit repetitions I do also delegate the writing part to other copywriters to vary the style of the articles.

Natural style of Link Building and pattern repetition

As previously mentioned along this article, to guarantee a successful Link Building campaign to your website, it needs to be as much natural as possible.

By “natural” I mean is to avoid repetition of patterns as per below:

• Types of Websites
• Quality of Websites
• Anchor
• Domains
• IPs
• Writing style of the articles
• Links insertion strategy in the articles