Top 5 Factors That Make a Backlink High-Quality
One of the most effective ways to improve the rankings of your site, is to get backlinks, ie, links from other websites to your website. Of course, not all backlinks are the same. While some backlinks can do nothing to improve your website’s ranking, there are others that can even have a negative impact on your website. This is why you should focus more on getting high quality backlinks. There are several different factors that make a backlink high quality. Not all SEO consultants have the same opinion on the topic. In this post, we are going to discuss about the different factors that are responsible for good quality backlinks.
If you expect all your backlinks to be perfect, it would be unrealistic. And if one of your backlinks does not meet all of these criteria that does not mean that the quality of the backlink is low. Read on to know about the criteria for high quality backlinks:
1. Domain age
According to industry experts, there is not much difference between a domain that is one month old and the one that is one and a half years old. But if a site is older with consistent ownership, then it proves that the site is trustworthy, and this will give your links stronger weight.
2. From a relevant source
If you search something in the search engines, the results that it provides, are relevant. So when they evaluate backlinks, it is natural that they will consider the relevance factor. There are different levels at which a backlink can be relevant. Search engines consider the relevance of the content directly surrounding the link, the relevance of the specific page with the link on it and the overall relevance of the linking site.
3. Synonym/phrase/exact match anchor link text used
If the words used as anchor links are the same as or similar to the keywords that you want to improve your rankings for, then the quality of a backlink increases. If there are a lot of incoming links that are made up of exactly the same anchor link text, then it will look quite unnatural. So try to use plenty of variations.
4. Link location in content
Backlinks that are to be found in the content, are generally editorial links. Search engines value these types of links the most. In a content, if the link is included early, this means that the writer of that content considers it to be an important link. So backlinks that are within the main area of content on a page and at the beginning paragraph of that content area, are considered to be of greater quality, compared to backlinks that are in the last paragraph of a content area or in the footer or sidebar.
5. Authority of linking domains
If your business’s website is linked to a high authority site, then search engines get the impression that your site should be put in the same bracket as those high quality sites. This is especially true if the high quality site shares the same niche as your site. If the other links on that particular page is linked to low quality sites, then that does not mean that your site will be classed as low quality. In fact, search engines may choose not to count that link as a factor in their ranking calculations.
Getting high quality backlinks, as discussed above, may seem like a daunting task, but there are smart marketers, who know exactly how to implement those methods and get quality backlinks. Once you get high quality backlinks, your website’s ranking position will improve in the SERPs and you will start getting more and more traffic to your website.