As the new year approaches, you will need authoritative backlinks to compete on search engines.
In this post, we will go over on-site optimization and also explain more about bad backlinks that affect your website from ranking on Google search for targeted keywords.
On-site optimization
On-site Optimization (SEO) is making sure your website pages, titles, tags, content and overall web structure is optimized for your target keywords for search engines.
Bad backlinks (inbound links or low authority links) can affect you site due to how your links are connected.
Some Small business websites can sometimes create unnatural links that will look sufficient, but instead of growth you find your business in a downward spiral. Other small businesses I've worked with, bought bad backlinks for their website and saw their rankings drop drastically within days of these links being indexed by Google and saw their rankings disappear for some of their well on-page optimized content.
In some cases, buying bad links might give you short term success but eventually it will not be pretty when google finds your bluff.
Best option - NEVER BUY BACKLINKS.
Where do bad or low quality links come from?
Most bad links can come from websites that are create for the sole purpose of supplying links to your website. Some times you might hire an SEO company that has no idea what they are doing, and the end results - links from sites that have no value to your content.
Backlinks should never be created unnaturally as Google will be able to detect how often these sites are linking to you and penalize your website with no warning.
Links from comments
We all know you can gain authoritative links from commenting on other websites, so why is this a problem? You see, just commenting on another website for links is bad for SEO.
Why is that?
In order to have a successful link profile, the site you are commenting on has to be related to your website, has to be a do-follow link and with page rank authority (established site with trust from Google). For example: If you sell hand bags, commenting on a restaurant blog will not help with your SEO efforts. Yes, you will surely obtain a link back but you won't gain any value to boost your search rankings.
To get serious about building a natural backlink profile and gaining the right links for your website to rank better on search, you must approach your link building from an analytic technical view.
Use well trusted softwares like; Ahrefs, Google analytics and Google webmaster tools. These tools will give you a clear inside of how your website is performing on Google search. This diagnose these tools and see why you need them yesterday if you are serious about SEO.
Ahrefs SEO Tool
Using Ahrefs, you can focus on building a visual understanding of how your backlinks flow to your website. You will be able to find the following:
- Refering Domains
- Full backlinks profile
- Quality links
- Low-quality links
- Pages with backlinks
- Backlink count per page
Being able to visually this data can help you analyze your site backlinks more thoroughly and build a better link strategy for your website.
Google Analytics
Using a free google analytics account, you can see how traffic flows into your site. Things that you'll need to check and improve for SEO.
- Keywords being used to search for your website.
- Referral traffic
- Organic search traffic
- Time spent on site
- Visitor flow, to see what pages get the most hits.
- Website structure and how it's presented on Google search.
Google Webmaster Tools
Do not ignore your Google webmaster tools, these tools will help you get a better understanding of how Google does the following;
- Ranks your site for targeted keyword in organic search.
- Actual keyword positions
- Crawling status
- Errors in regards to non responsive pages.
- Demode links in search.
- Index pages instantly from your website.
How to get started with off-page optimization.
Over optimized anchor texts
Backlinks to your website are linked using an anchor text. This anchor text can contain your website's name, keyword or URL.
So why can my anchor text be a problem when it comes to optimizing my site?
Google uses your anchor text as a brigde between your website and the backlink to better understand your page. If your site uses exact keywords for anchor text, as many unqualified companies might do, this will expose your site to a Google penalty.
The best is to stick with your URL as anchor text or your company name if not too long.
Backlinks from India, China and Russia
I have seen this over and over again. Working on a site that has links from countries with different languages but expecting to rank for keywords in English. To be honest, this is terrifying as you are literally killing your sites ranking on steroids.
Websites linking to you have to be related to your business. So understanding that a link from a China, India or Russia websites for a business in Los Angeles, CA will not work out well as the link is just a backlink with no juice to get your website on search ranking for your keywords. In order to rank your business locally, you will need to have links from sites within your city, that possess authority in your niche or industry.
How to remove bad backlinks from your site today
We have looked at the different ways you can gain backlinks without knowing and where suspicious links might come from and why they have no value.
Now let's take a look at how you can get your backlinks on track by removing or disavowing bad ones from your link profile.
Note: As your website grows, you will find backlinks you never even thought you had, just make sure they a natural and of value.
So how do you disable these bad links?
Using my strategy, I have developed ways to disable these bad links without losing your Google rankings for keywords and pages visible on search, actually in most cases your rankings will increase within a short period of time as Google roles out updates and you build authoritative backlinks to those pages.
Things you can do;
- Contact the website linking to you and politely ask the site owner to remove the link. If they can't be removed, just simply disavow these links in Google.
- Too many bad backlinks, create an excel spreadsheet and analyze which ones to disavow right away.
- Get rid of all 404/410 pages on your website
Most of these points, especially your 404/401 pages should be disabled only if you strongly believe your website has been penalized by Google. Removing these pages will affect your website traffic and rankings in the short term, will eventually increase your search rankings and traffic in the future. (It's hard to tell when this will start occurring, but with google algorithm updates on a monthly bases - should see your rankings moving on the positive side).
Note: When you disavow links, these backlinks will still be visible in you link profile, but will not be put into account when ranking your website on Google search.
How does Backlinkfy remove my bad backlinks?
Before we start working on your links, we analyze your industry and build a list of competitors. Then we do the following;
- Manage your backlinks and find the links that actually harm your site. (Unnatural links, spams, link exchanges)
- We Stop Manual Action/algorithmic Google Penalties by cleaning up your backlink profile. Making more diverse and unique links from your industry though content and competitive research.
- Start comparing your backlinks to competitors and find great new backlink opportunities within your niche.
- Create industry alerts to monitor new link opportunities and keywords in your industry for your business.
How will you get your website ranking again?
Divine Tumenta is an entrepreneur and professional digital marketing expert based in Los Angeles. He has worked in digital marketing for more than 8 years. He is currently founder and CEO of backlinkfy.com and a go to consultant for startups and small businesses in the USA.
