Are backlinks important and should you waste your time?
Whenever you look for content about how to grow your traffic, backlinking is often thrown on the table.
If you have been blogging for a while, I am sure you have been told to guest post. Or reach out to bloggers, or do post commenting and leave your links.
But why are backlinks important for your website?
Is it for traffic, or is it for SEO or both?
Today, I will discuss:
- What is a backlink?
- Two types of backlinks
- Why are backlinks important for your website?
- Is it hard to get backlinks?
By the end of this tutorial, you should have a clear perspective of why backlinking activities should belong to your top priorities.
I founded Backlink Society in such a way that you can get backlinks without having to pay for it or writing a guest post.
What is a backlink?
A backlink is a link that goes to your website or web pages. This link is placed on another website, and how it got there is another story altogether, which I will explain later on.
Below is a screenshot of my backlink report for one of my websites, Just Keep Shippin’—an e-commerce blog where I talk about everything about making an online store.
As you can see, there are 17 referring domains to my website, and 1 is a potentially toxic domain, which I will have to disavow later on. What does disavow mean?
Disavow means you tell Google that you want nothing to do with that source of backlink. You do this because it is likely that the website is a spam, and you do not want to be associated with that.
Now, back to backlinks.
The screenshot below is from a website called Film Ink, an Australian website. The website owner published a post called Business Ideas for Small Business Online 2020.
In that article, you will see that the phrase “plan before you start dropshipping” has a different text color. That is because it is a link.
It is a backlink to my blog post, Dropshipping Plan: what should you prepare for?
I do not know the owner of Film Ink, and I did not ask for this website operator to link to me. It just happened.
Why?
He saw my blog and decided that the content is good enough to share.
That is how a backlink works. And that is my backlink definition.
A backlink is a link to your website from another website. A backlink is not an ad that you pay for.
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Two types of backlinks
There are only two kinds of backlinks.
The first one is called do-follow, and the second one is a no-follow.
Before you understand the difference between these two, or what they mean, we need to go back to how search engines work, particularly Google.
Google has what we call spider bots. Their job is to crawl all accessible web pages on the internet, and then index these pages.
In a nutshell, this is what happens:
- Spider bot crawls the world wide web
- These bots see or read images, videos, texts, and links on web pages
- The bots index the web pages
Now, as the robots see the links, their natural programming is to follow them.
What they do is to open that link, and then they read the content of that new webpage. And if they see a new link, the process goes on.
Why?
Because that is Google’s job—to explore different web pages.
The only reason the spider bots would not follow that link is if the website operator placed code that tells Google robots and other search engine bots not to follow it.
A do-follow link is what you want.
In our example, if Google crawls the website of Film Ink and sees that anchor text “plan before you start dropshipping,” it will open that link.
And that is a link to my website. Should Google read my web page and decide it has great content, it will get indexed.
Then, Google will show my webpage to other users in the future who are looking for content about “plan before you start dropshipping” or “dropshipping plan.”
As you can see, a do-follow link trickles down what is called “link juice” or “SEO juice” from search engines.
On the other hand, a no-follow link is useless for SEO. While a no-follow link is still a link, Google ignores them, and your web page will not get explored by Google.
Why are backlinks important for your website?
There are several reasons why backlinks are important for your website. However, there are only two major reasons. The first one is indexing, and the second one is web traffic.
Here are the reasons why backlinks are important:
1. Credibility
A backlink to your website is an upvote. In the physical world, a friend tells you to go read a book because it is amazing.
So, you buy a copy and read it.
Online, Google robots have the same “mindset.”
If a web page tells go Google to go follow a link, Google begins to think that you have a vote of confidence from this website operator.
Otherwise, why would they refer their readers to you?
The same thing goes with a human being. If a person is reading the blog post of Film Ink, and then sees a link to my website, the reader is likely to click that, and I will get free traffic.
2. Authority
There are many SEO companies that measure the authority score of a website.
What I use is SEMRush for all my SEO needs and analysis. It is an SEO tool, social media poster, and backlink checker rolled into one.
If you look at the example below, the authority score of Film Ink is 54, which is quite high.
While the authority of a website is called by many names, they are all scored between 1 to 100, with 100 being the highest authority.
Google also has the same ranking system called Page Rank, and all other authority scores were modeled after this.
If a website with high authority links back to you, this influences your authority.
If a website like Wikipedia links back to you, can you just imagine how Google and human beings will perceive your site?
What does this mean for you?
You need to build links to build authority. The more links from high-authority sources, the more your authority will grow.
And if you have high authority, your website will get more respected by the community and the Google search engine.
3. Page Ranking
The number of backlinks to a web page determines how strong it is. If Google keeps on seeing many websites linking back to one of your web pages, Google is going to visit that web page more often.
And what happens then?
What happens is you get better chances of getting indexed, provided that there is nothing wrong with your page.
As Google keeps on exploring your site, it will begin to see its value, and it can make a fair decision on how to rank your web page on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
This is why viral social media posts are also critical—the original link to social media post directs users to the original webpage. The more a page gets shared, the more social signals it sends to Google.
And the more social signals there are, the more Google may think highly of your web content.
Google measures hundreds of things before it decides to push your webpage to the top, and a backlink is just one of them.
Is it hard to get backlinks?
Yes, and there are many of types of link building that I will discuss in another blog post.
In the many months that I have been doing affiliate marketing and blogging, I realized how hard it was to get backlinks, especially from authority sites.
While there were some websites that backlinked to me, several of these are nothing more than directory sites and websites that have nothing to do with my niche.
I submitted proposals to bloggers, only to get the cold treatment—I never got a response.
Getting backlinks is frustrating.
This is why I created Backlink Society—an organization where bloggers, affiliate marketers, and online store owners can message each other and swap backlinks.
My goal is to have thousands of members—verified ones—so we can all work together and get backlinks from one another.
I founded Backlink Society in such a way that you can get backlinks without having to pay for it or writing a guest post.
Summary: Why Are Backlinks Important for Your Website?
Backlinking efforts are too tedious. You can read my other blog posts about how you can get backlinks to your website.
And if you do, you will have an idea what kind of effort is required.
But hey, nothing comes easy, right?
Now that you know why backlinks matter, it is time for you to make an action plan and execute than plan.
If you could, you have to struggle to get at least two backlinks to your website per month. These two backlinks must come from different websites, or else the search engines will think you are operating a Private Blog Network, which is a big no-no for SEO.
Or you can join us in Backlink Society where you can get free backlinks.
