Backlinks play a major role in successful SEO promotion. Today, when visiting different informational websites, you can see links to commercial websites within the text of an informational page. Such links affect how often a website is crawled by search bots and help them better understand the topic of a page through anchors (link text). There are many ways to place a backlink. Let’s look at the most popular methods used by SEO specialists for promotion:
- Sitewide links;
- Editorial links;
- Crowd or forum links;
- Outreach links.
Links are also divided into anchor and non-anchor links, depending on the text used in the link. Let’s take a closer look at each type.
What Are Sitewide Links?
When a link is placed in a website’s header or footer, it is called a sitewide link because it appears on every page of the referring website. At present, such links have almost no impact on rankings. To avoid a negative effect, it is better to place non-anchor sitewide links, which will not contribute to the overuse of a commercial anchor. Here is an example of what sitewide links look like in a backlink analysis:
As we can see, one domain brings several thousand links to the website.
What Are Editorial Links?
Some of the most common and useful links for promotion are permanent editorial links. Such backlinks are placed on informational websites with strong SEO metrics and traffic. Links in these articles can be either anchor or non-anchor links. Depending on the popularity and metrics of the referring domain, the cost of placing such a link can be very high.
This type of link is a good way to promote a project because, when writing a long article, a copywriter can insert the necessary key phrase as naturally as possible to link to your website. In addition, placement on a high-quality resource can improve your website’s rankings in search. Here is an example of an editorial link:
What Are Crowd Links Used For?
Crowd links, or links from relevant sources, are links placed on forums, review websites, in comments, and on other resources where content is generated by portal users. Due to the nature of forum websites, such links make it possible to obtain many organic links from multiple sources.
Since Google requires the most diverse possible link profile for successful promotion, crowd links make it possible to obtain more than 500 links from 100 referring domains at a low cost. These links help diversify the backlink profile and can contribute to website growth. However, when using crowd links, you need to be very careful and review the metrics of potential referring domains, as most forums have zero SEO metrics and will not help with promotion.
You can see examples of forum links by filtering your website’s or a competitor’s profile by the Ref. page platform: Message boards parameter. For example:
What Is Outreach?
The most difficult to obtain and most influential type of backlinks are outreach links. These are links placed on highly relevant referring domains within already promoted articles that rank in top positions for informational queries. Unlike editorial links, which are placed in a new article on a referring domain, outreach links are placed in articles that already rank in the top 3 for target informational queries. Immediately after placement, such links can deliver not only rapid improvement in backlink profile quality due to the high quality of the referring article, but also traffic from a target audience looking for information about the services you provide.
Such links may be placed for free, through partnerships, reciprocal promotion, or for payment. The difficulty in obtaining this type of link lies in the need to contact the owner of the website containing the article you are interested in and offer attractive terms that the referring domain will accept in exchange for placing a link to your resource.
Types of Text Links
I will also briefly describe the types of text links. There are only two:
Anchor Links
These are links whose text contains a commercial anchor for which you want to rank in top positions, for example, “buy a refrigerator in Kyiv.” The exact use of such an anchor in an article helps the search engine understand the topic of your page, and if the article containing the anchor is high-quality, you will gain ranking growth. However, you should not overuse anchor links, because anchor links should not account for more than 20–30% of the entire backlink profile. If your website has more than 50% anchor links, a search engine may interpret this as link abuse and an attempt to manipulate search bots for promotion.
Non-Anchor Links
This is the type of link that should make up the majority of a backlink profile. Non-anchor links include those whose anchor text contains one of the following:
- The URL of the promoted page;
- A branded search query for the website;
- Words such as “here,” “via the link,” and similar phrases;
- Links placed on images without a filled-in alt attribute.
Non-anchor links are perceived by search engines as natural and organic links that cannot harm your project’s rankings.
Conclusion
Today, we have covered what backlinks are, which types of backlinks exist, their importance, and their degree of influence on SEO promotion. However, in addition to buying backlinks, you should not forget about the quality of a project’s internal optimisation. If your content is not optimised for keywords or the quality of on-page factors is low, backlinks will not have the desired effect. To successfully bring your website to the top, you need to work on it comprehensively. To bring your website to the top, contact a private SEO specialist.
