Most of your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts focus on earning high-quality backlinks. 

Links that bring traffic to your website from external sources are also called Inbound links. Backlinks create a significant impact on your website’s overall search performance. 

It also establishes authority and increases your site’s exposure across the Internet. 

Google prioritizes useful information. It ranks websites which are credible, trustworthy, and authoritative. Many websites achieve such results more efficiently with effective link building. 

However, link building isn’t the only factor; there are many others such as internal linking, quality content, organic SEO, technical SEO, website’s UI/UX which play a significant role in building your website’s authority and making it rank high-up on the SERPs. 

While many website owners often fall under the false pretense of creating a lot of backlinks irrespective of focusing on its quality. In the wake of doing so, they often create plenty of low-quality backlinks. 

This can often hurt your website’s overall search rankings. 

In fact, bad-quality links can potentially harm your business online instead of doing more good. And here’s what makes us wonder, where do we begin? How do we acquire high-quality backlinks? 

In this article, we are going to talk about the nature of high-quality backlinks & how Google evaluates them. Interested? Let’s read everything about high-quality backlinks we know so far. 

What Are Backlinks? 

The simplest definition of backlinks is incoming links that one website places on another. 

For example, you’re a news website and you’ve recently covered a piece of important news. However, this news which you’ve covered also includes elements where you have to cite sources from external sources. 

As it is with the case of news, people often want to fact-check whether the information is true or a hoax. Therefore, you create an anchor text on your website citing the original source. 

To help you understand the concept, let’s take a look at the following illustration: 

What are Quality Backlinks

Why Backlinks Are Important For Google? 

When your site earns backlinks, it impacts your website’s search visibility and increases its ranking position overall. Google takes a backlink as a “vote of confidence” when authoritative websites link back to your domain.

Here are a few ways how backlinks can benefit your position in Google SERP. 

Improved Organic Search Ranking

Creating backlinks dramatically improves your organic search visibility. The more web pages link back to your website, the better your site will appear on the searches. A website with a strong backlink profile authenticates Google how your site content is relevant. 

Also Read: How To Optimize Your Core Web Vitals To Improve Website Performance

Increased Website Visibility

The greater the backlink profile of your website, the more visible your website is going to become for search engines such as Google. High-quality backlinks will enable search engines to discover your content faster and increase your website’s chances for quick indexing. 

Builds Website Online Credibility

Google favors websites which hold significant credibility online. If you want your website to perform better in the SERPs, you should always invest in effective link-building. It gives your site a more authoritative appeal and eventually increases the site’s trustworthiness. 

Drive More Referral Traffic

Backlinks can often bring direct traffic to your website from external sources. You can get links from new aggregators, third-party reviews, and from many other online sources. Eventually, you bring more traffic to your website when a user reading the post with your link, clicks on it. 

Increase Website’s Domain Authority

The greater the backlink’s profile, the stronger will be your website’s domain authority. Your site’s domain authority and your website’s page authority define how your overall SEO performance score is going to impact your overall search rankings. 

How Does Google Evaluate High-Quality Backlinks? 

Google Evaluates High Quality Backlinks

When it comes to receiving high-quality backlinks, Google keeps a regular check to update its algorithm. That’s why it’s important to stay abreast with the latest SEO developments. 

Here are a few things that you need to keep in mind when working on quality backlinks: 

  • Relevance: The backlink should come from a site relevant to your content. Google values links that make sense contextually and are from related industries or topics.
  • Authority: Links from authoritative sites carry more weight. A backlink from a well-established, trusted source is more valuable than one from a low-quality or unknown site.
  • Anchor Text: The text used in the link (anchor text) should be relevant to the linked page’s content. Google sees descriptive and relevant anchor text as a signal of a high-quality link.
  • Diversity: A natural link profile includes backlinks from a variety of domains and sources. Google views a diverse set of links as a sign of organic link-building.
  • Editorial Placement: Links that are editorially placed, meaning they are naturally embedded in content by the site owner or editor, are more valuable than links that are bought or added in a manipulative manner.
  • Link Position: Links placed within the main content of a page (as opposed to sidebars, footers, or comment sections) are considered higher quality.
  • Traffic: Links that drive actual traffic to your site are more valuable. Google can infer the quality of a backlink based on how much traffic it generates.
  • No Spammy Behavior: Backlinks from spammy or penalized sites can harm your rankings. Google values backlinks from clean, well-maintained sites.
  • Recency and Freshness: Recently acquired links or those from regularly updated sites can be more valuable, as they indicate current relevance.
  • No-follow vs. Do-follow: While “no-follow” links don’t pass PageRank, a healthy mix of do-follow and no-follow links is natural and seen positively by Google.

The above discussed aren’t the only factors. Google also evaluates the quality of backlinks by covering other technical aspects of the website as well such as: 

  • Nofollow 
  • Redirects 
  • Alt attribute 
  • Anchor text
  • Robots.txt

How to Get Quality Backlinks for Your Website? 

Backlinks are basically references. They work the same way as citations do on academic or Wikipedia pages. They make your content more authentic and establish your website’s brand authority. 

Here’s a cool infographic that we have put together: 

Quality Backlinks for Your Website

Create Useful & Information Rich Content

Believe it or not, everyone loves a page that’s informative. If you want to earn backlinks to your website, you can always create well-detailed content with highly interactive visuals. Some content types which are remarkably great for your website to stand out are infographics, scannable content, unique industry-specific blog posts, and websites that cover unique trends with interactive data. All such content types assist in linking back to the authoritative web. 

Build Nurturing Relationships

Link-building activities are great for reaching out to industry influencers and webmasters. This practice is great for expanding your network & promoting web pages. 

Broken Link Building Method

Usually, broken links are mended by reaching out and contacting webmasters and red-flagging broken links on a certain website. It’s a great way to highlight opportunities & make the necessary recommendations to a web page so broken links can easily be replaced. While doing it, SEO marketers often capitalize by asking the relevant webmaster to offer them a chance to build quality backlinks. In this way, the broken link is recreated benefiting both parties. 

Find Competitor Backlinks

It’s always a good idea to keep track of competitor’s SEO strategies. You can start by identifying their existing link building strategies and reverse engineer them. For example, you perform a link-building profile search on your competitor and check out relevant sources from where they have previously created web links. Assess these links and see which website owners to connect with. Discuss with them what opportunities are available to add your particular business to their page. 

Convert Mentions to Links

There are many websites which mention a specific brand or product by adding a hyperlink to one or two of their posts for you. These are your business followers and therefore, it’s always great to have a chat with them. Connecting with them is easy as they are already convinced you are worth the mention. You can always request them for a backlink or two to increase your credibility. 

Guest Blogging

It’s always great to write about an industry trend or something amazing and get it published on one of the popular blogs within your particular industry. Guest blogging opportunities are present in abundance. You can easily find these opportunities on social media, or simply check the “Write for Us” section for different websites. When going for a guest post, it’s always best to do your research. Determine their existing strategy, understand their target market, and evaluate which of the guest posts are top-performing on social media. In this way, you can get a few good backlinks to your website. 

Good Backlinks vs Bad Backlinks – Understanding the Difference! 

Good Backlinks vs Bad Backlinks

Backlinks which are coming from relevant and authoritative sources are termed good-quality backlinks. They usually come from websites which have a high domain authority. More or less, these websites publish content that works incredibly well on the Internet. They are not only well-researched & informative but are well-optimized on primary and secondary keywords. 

One good example of a high-quality backlink is the “Natural” editorial links. Such inbound links often exist on sources like news sites, large publications, opinion pieces, and blogs. 

Such content is not only information-rich but the context is high-relevant.

Whereas, bad or low-quality backlinks are links coming from unreliable and irrelevant online sources. They are possibly websites which are penalized for violating Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. 

Getting backlinks from such sites hurts your online credibility. 

The Best Way to Improve Backlink Quality 

Since then we have learned how Google evaluates backlinks and what is the difference between good-quality and bad-quality backlinks.

Here are a few tips on how you can improve the backlink quality. 

  • Optimize your content
  • Leverage guest blogging
  • Reach out to reputable directories
  • Participate in conferences
  • Optimize your email marketing tactics
  • Follow the best Google practices

Want to Build High-Quality Backlinks & Boost Your Digital Marketing Efforts? 

Finding the best sources to earn high-quality backlinks for your brand can be a bit of a challenge. In fact, good SEO truly depends on what kind of websites are linking back to your business. 

You can achieve all that and much more by reaching out to Branex, a complete digital marketing agency. We can help you optimize your website and acquire high-quality backlinks so your digital presence thrives. Call now to schedule a consultation with our SEO experts so we can guide you better.