Coffee Breaks: Backlinks
What is a backlink?
A backlink simply refers to a link from one website to another. Search engines such as Google use backlinks as a ranking signal under the premise that when one website is linking to another, they believe that the content they are linking to is of high-quality, is useful and is interesting.
High quality backlinks can help to increase a website’s ranking position and organic results in SERPs (search engine results pages).
How do backlinks work?
Backlinks are incredibly important within search engine algorithms, as well as SEO and website strategy. They are often compared to conversations among websites; identifying interesting articles and blog posts and recommending them to one another. This will bring benefits to both websites; increasing authority and gaining valuable website traffic.
Types of backlinks
There are two main types of backlinks, with one being of significantly more value than the other.
Nofollow links – This tells a website to ignore a link, it doesn’t pass any value from one website to another, and therefore is not helpful in improving organic results.
Dofollow links – These are the backlinks that you will want to achieve, particularly if they are coming from respected websites. This backlink will help increase organic rankings and website traffic.
It’s worth bearing in mind that some dofollow links can have a detrimental effect on a website. Links that come from suspicious websites or are gained from breaking terms of service of search engines could result in penalisation or even de-indexing of your website.
That is why an SEO expert will always focus on the quality of backlinks, as opposed to the quantity.