An Extensive Guide About Different Types of Backlinks
What are the Factors That Impact Link Value?
Before getting backlinks from a different website, you’ve got to make sure that you evaluate the link quality. Let’s go through a few factors that can impact link quality.
1. Website Authority
This one goes without saying. The authority of the website that you are linking to speaks volumes about the quality of the backlink. If you get backlinks from high authority websites that are well recognized in the niche, search engine bots will signal the algorithms to rank your website high.
2. Do-Follow vs No-Follow Backlinks
There are two types in this regard. Do-follow links prompt search engine crawlers to index the web page that it’s linked to. However, the no-follow backlinks prompt search engines to ignore the webpage and it brings no link value or link juice.
Recently, two more attributes have been introduced by Google, rel=sponsored and rel=ugc. When you’re linking to sites with monetary intent, you should use rel=sponsored while UGC is recommended for user-generated links.
SEO companies in Dubai and around the world suggest that you should always be aiming for do-follow backlinks because it has far more benefits as compared to other attributes. However, other link types such as no-follow backlinks can drive traffic to your website so they definitely hold value as well.
3. On-site location of the backlink
The location of the link has its significance. For, example if the backlink to your website is placed on the website where it’s easily noticeable by visitors, it would increase the chances of getting traffic and eventually ranking.
What Are The Acquisition-Based Types Of Backlinks?
There are three broad categories in which backlinks can be classified based on acquisition.
Natural backlinks
You gain natural backlinks by publishing valuable content. When others find your content valuable and worthy of linking, they link back to your website. For that, you have to constantly upload valuable content on your website. Search engines love natural backlinks because they add value to the users.
Paid backlinks
Apart from natural backlinks, there are a few more ways to trick search engine bots into getting your website rank. One way is to get paid backlinks. You basically buy paid backlinks from another website that are relevant to your niche and have high authority and traffic.
There is a catch here though. Search engines hate paid backlinks and if they track your backlink trail, you can get in trouble so you got to be really careful when getting paid backlinks. You cannot continue getting backlinks from the same websites and expect to keep on gaining ranking.
Outreach backlinks
In this type of backlinking, you have to manually reach out to website owners or blog owners and tell them why they need to build backlinks from their website to yours. For this, your website needs to have high authority and your content should be top-notch. This would benefit them as well because they would be providing value to their visitors by pointing them in the right direction.
What are the most advantageous backlinks for SEO?
To figure out the types of backlinks that prove to be most advantageous for SEO, you have to understand the rationale behind backlinking. It is to increase your website’s search engine friendliness and to gain ranking.
Here are a few backlinks that are proven to be beneficial:
Editorial backlinks
It is always good when publishers refer to your website when writing about a relevant topic. This increases your website’s trustworthiness and users might pay you a visit as well which will increase your website traffic and increase authority as well.
Guest posting backlinks
Guest posting is a practice of writing content for other websites and adding links leading back to your website. This helps in gaining credible traffic because the websites you’re posting content on are considered authoritative in your niche and users trust their word.
When they read your content which is valuable with a link to your website, they tend to visit your website as well. Moreover, you’re eventually adding value to their website as well as building your report with them and they might propose better opportunities in the future.
Blogger outreach backlinks
Just like the name suggests, these backlinks are acquired by reaching out to bloggers in the same niche as you and have the same audience base.
Putting backlinks in these blogs will bring opportunities to attract a relevant audience back to your website. It’s just another way of reaching out to your potential customers. If you have valuable content to portray, all you need is to channelize your marketing strategy and effectively tell people that you are the best at what you do.
Business profile backlinks
To generate business profile backlinks, you will have to create your business profile on multiple platforms such as business listings, social media sites, business directories, etc. You have to create your pages on these platforms, add content and add links leading back to your website.
Free tool backlinks
To gain this kind of backlinks, you will have to offer some free tools, it can be a basic version of a premium app. It is an amazing way to entice users to subscribe or link back to your website. You can leave a subscribe button to buy the premium version of the app as well.
Acknowledge backlinks
These are quite similar to paid backlinks in terms of mechanism but for this, you have to make a donation so that the website owner recognizes it and acknowledges and in that acknowledgment note, leave a link back to your website.
You have to keep tracking the noteworthy events that you can contribute to or the websites in your niche that can prove to be beneficial. You can also track your competitors to see what they are doing to get better ideas.
Guest post bio backlinks
Sometimes the website you are posting a guest post on doesn’t allow you to add a link so what you do is, you add a link back to your website in the author’s bio. These links are not as effective in terms of increasing ranking but they still work well.
However, what you don’t want to do is leave links in the comment section. Leaving spammy links in the comments section won’t increase your ranking but will instead have a negative impact on the website’s ranking.
Types of Backlinks that You Should Avoid
You have to understand that not all kinds of backlinks are good for your website and it is not always about the number of backlinks but it is about quality. Here are the types of backlinks that you should avoid when you engage in link building.
Paid backlinks
Gaining paid backlinks is basically trying to trick the algorithms and search engines do not like it at all. It does work sometimes and many SEO experts in Dubai and around the world indeed use this technique to their advantage but it has the potential to damage your website as well.
As aforementioned, if search engines catch the link trail and notice that you have been getting backlinks from the same paid websites, you might get a penalty in terms of decreased ranking in the SERPs.
Non-newsworthy backlinks
We all know how important press releases are in increasing brand awareness and for backlinking as well. However, if your press release is not adding value to the customers and is non-newsworthy, you might want to stay away from putting links in such press releases because it might negatively impact your website’s performance in SERPs. Backlinks placed in non-newsworthy press releases are considered spammy and are not beneficial.
Irrelevant directory links
It is not advisable to create unauthentic profiles in directories just to get backlinks. It has been seen that they do more harm than good and can significantly damage your SEO efforts as well as brand awareness.
Forum backlinks
Forums are for people to understand and learn things so as long as you are providing links to educate people and add value by leading them to relevant pages, it’s all well and good. However, forums are mostly being misused by a lot of people who sign up with forums just to leave a lot of links leading back to their websites. This is not going to help and will eventually decrease your website authority instead of increasing the ranking.
To sum it up, backlinking is an integral part of SEO and will continue to be but it has to be done in a systematic manner. You have to keep in mind that it’s not about the number of backlinks but quality so you should not just focus on getting backlinks wherever they’re coming from. Instead, you have to think of ways to add value to the readers and platforms you’re putting content on.
You need a well-knit backlinking strategy that will help you get backlinks from high authority and quality websites and that can only be done by producing and featuring quality content that engages the users and also opens ways for backlinking to and from your website.
Conclusion
This is it for today’s blog. I hope you liked reading it and that you’ve learned a thing or two about backlinking types, their benefits, and harmful factors. Do share your feedback with me and share this blog with your friends who are interested in learning SEO.
If you have a website that you want to rank, reach out to Prism Digital, the best SEO agency in Dubai and our experts will help you devise a holistic SEO strategy involving both on-page and off-page factors and help your website rank high in the search engines.
About The Author: Lovetto Nazareth
Lovetto Nazareth is the Founder & CEO of Prism Digital, a Dubai-based digital marketing and advertising agency he started nearly two decades ago from a laptop and a vision, as he puts it, to one of the region's established full-service agencies spanning SEO, PPC, social media, web design, and PR.
Over more than 19 years in advertising and digital marketing, Lovetto has guided thousands of campaigns across the UAE and GCC, working across sectors from real estate to hospitality to fintech. He writes and speaks on digital transformation and marketing strategy, and has contributed opinion pieces to Campaign Middle East, one of the region's leading marketing trade publications.
He takes a data-first approach to growth testing, measuring, and iterating rather than relying on guesswork and outside of work he's an adventure sports enthusiast and a singer-songwriter.
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