What Are Backlinks And Why Do You Need Them?

Today in this article, we’re discussing about Backlinks and why they’re important.

Google is one of the search engines with the largest market share in the world, it uses a complex algorithm to develop the ranking that will decide the position of a certain website on its results pages, also known as SERP . Although no one knows exactly all the factors that influence it, we do know the most important and how they influence web positioning.

One of the factors that Google values the most when it comes to giving visibility to your website is SEO and backlinks . A backlink is a link that points directly from a third party’s website to ours with the aim of offering additional information or citing us as a source. The backlinks can be considered as “mentions” of other websites that Google interprets as votes of confidence, resulting in a better positioning.

As we have explained to you, backlinks are links that redirect us from a web page to our own. That is, even if you do not look for the name of a page directly in a search engine, you can access it through another one where you are. We explain it to you with an example:

With this example we can begin to glimpse the importance that the intelligent placement of backlinks on third-party pages can have. In short, backlinks are a link to your page that is on the outside.

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Factors To Consider And Use Of Backlinks

Now that you know what backlinks are , let’s explain how they influence your website.

They Facilitate Indexing

When indexing a website in the search engine, the Google spider or crawler navigates through the network following the outgoing links of each portal.

Generally, websites with a lot of authority Google assigns a higher crawl budget , that is, the spider will visit the referring websites more often , facilitating the indexing of their content. Therefore, if our portal has a backlink to a highly authoritative website, the crawler will also visit us more frequently and allow faster indexing.

Watch Out For Link Farms

As the popular proverb says “made the law, made the trap”. And there are numerous websites that are dedicated to selling backlinks to transfer their alleged authority to other portals. Those who practice it turn their websites into authentic link farms that Google tends to penalize through its Penguin algorithm . If our website has a lot of low-quality backlinks like the ones in this example, it could also be penalized.

They Transfer Authority

Just as a poor-quality backlink can harm our link building strategy , an inbound link from a referring website can transfer some of your authority to us and help us improve our page rank . They are different link building agencies in the market but you have to be careful while choosing best link building services.

The best way to get backlinks is naturally, that is, creating valuable content that other websites echo and link to us as a reference. However, not all inbound links transfer authority, below we will tell you why and the types of backlinks that exist.

Types Of Backlinks

Until a few months ago, a webmaster could use the “rel” tags to tell Google if the outbound link type was do-follow or no-follow . From time to time, the sponsored and ugc attributes have been incorporated into the equation. Each of them is intended to provide Google with information about the type of link.

Do-Follow Links

Do-follow links are those that are used by default. The difference with other types of bonds is that the do-follow transferred authority to other websites , so receiving a backlink like this can be beneficial as long as it comes from a portal authority.

No-Follow Links

The main difference between do-follow and no-follow links is that the latter do not convey authority . But be careful, because Google can follow the link and access its content, which will make it easier for the crawler to index it. If you want Google to not be able to crawl one of your pages, then you must modify the robots.txt file .