Friday 29 November 2013

Backlink update for 2014

We often get asked, what is a good backlink and how can I avoid bad links?

The answer to this is easy. A good link is one that gets indexed and a bad link is one that does not.

There are two things we know for sure:

1. A good link will improve your ranking.
2. A bad link will not harm your ranking.

We blogged about the misconception of a bad link back in April and we have certainly seen what we thought was happening happen. So let’s look at what Google say in their webmaster guidelines.

“In some circumstances, incoming links can affect Google’s opinion of a page or site. First and foremost, we recommend that you remove as many spammy or low-quality links from the web as possible."


What's interesting is how none committal Google are when it comes to the affect that bad links will have (see where we have marked the test red). Our believe is that they are creating a hysteria surrounding links in order to convince people that link building should not be done and any links you have built should be removed.

What we know is that backlinks are still the most important off-site factor when it comes to ranking. We also know that Google uses a robot to find and index these links. So, with current technology it would be so hard for Google to decipher whether a backlink is bad or not, they could make a guess but this is not something that they would be able to rank people lower on. Also, if bad links lowered ranking there would be a whole industry of bad link building to competitor’s websites and Google could not allow that.

So in the words of Ferris Beulah “we’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again” a bad link will not lower your ranking, it just won’t move it higher.

Our core SEO product fuses perfectly the important on-site work with a low frequency manual link building strategy that will give your site the maximum ranking benefit without any chance of being penalised by any search engine.

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