Before getting answer of this question, you must understand what is inbound linking and how it affects. Here you will get to know everything about inbound links and their impact on your ranking.
Inbound linking is one way to improve your website rank and grow traffic. There are many other types of links you can build for better ranking in search engine results.
Let’s have a look at different types of links you can use to make a successful marketing campaign.
Internal Links:
As the name suggests, internal links are hyperlinks that points to another page of the same website. These links allows users to navigate and establish site architecture. Through internal links you can make it easy for crawler to index pages of your website. Here is an internal link to SEO page. (This link points to the SEO page of this website.)
Outbound Links:
Outbound link directs user to a webpage of another website from your website. By having outbound links, you can connect with other websites. You can use them for pointing to useful resource related to your topic. Having outbound links to high authority sites will improve your reputation. With the help of outbound links search engine can find relevant websites. Here is an outbound link. (This link will take you to some more information about outbound links.)
Inbound Links:
Inbound links are also called as backlinks. These links are hyperlinks from another website pointing to your website.
As shown in the above image, xyz website has an external link (outbound link) to your website and your website has an inbound link from xyz website.
Inbound links are important for your ranking because they increase website value. To understand this, let’s take one example. Consider your company representative is promoting your products and services to your prospects. On the other hand your existing clients are praising your products and services.
What do you think? Who will have more impact on your prospects?
Obviously the one who doesn’t belong to your company but still praising you. Your client praising, promoting and referencing your company have more value than promotion done by your company representative. Information received from authority makes is authentic in same way links from authoritative websites gives authenticity to your web page.
Inbound links are same, they represent vote of confidence. But these votes are not that easy to get, you have to build or earn them. Getting inbound links is as much important as getting them from high authority, good websites rather than low quality, spammy sites.
Good inbound links can boost your website rank whereas bad links may lead you to get penalty and lower rank.
Now you must have got the answer of the question in the title. No, inbound linking doesn’t hurt rankings if they are built with good SEO practices.
Though you have found the answer but still there is much more that you need to know for building healthy inbound links which will help your website to improve its rank in SERPs.
So let’s see how to generate good inbound links:
Do-follow links:
Dofollow is a descriptor of links describing that search engines crawl them and count them as votes of quality.
Try to build do-follow links than links with no-follow attribute. In simple words you need votes from people who are happy to recommend you and strongly believe in your quality rather than having unsure votes which says we will recommend you but don’t believe that you are good enough.
Do-follow links pass the ranking power to your page from the web page it is built on. Links with no-follow attribute tells search engine not to follow these links.
You can use no-follow attribute to your outbound links when you are not sure of their quality such as links in comments of your blogs which may lead to spammy sites.
Do-follow link helps to improve authority of your site. But this doesn’t mean that no-follow links are totally useless. Links from high PR sites with no-follow attribute can boost your brand value and also they are useful for getting referral traffic from such high quality sites. You need to keep the balance between these two types of links.
Do-follow links should be more than no-follow links.
There is no standard link ratio that fits for all. Above image just shows sample data which represents the fact that do-follow links should surpass the no-follow links.
Links from Authoritative Sites:
Make sure that you are building links from authoritative sites. You need to connect to the authority blogs and sites to build high quality inbound links. You can reach out to authoritative directories, social bookmarking sites and other type of sources.
When you are getting inbound links from the site having good domain authority then quality score of your link will be increased. You will need to take efforts for getting such links from authoritative sites but once you get it, it will definitely boost your website rank and provides you long term results.
Relevancy:
You can improve the relevance of your inbound links by focusing on following factors:
- Build inbound links from relevant sites of your industry or topic to make them more effective.
- Content should be relevant with your link. Content tells search engine what your page is about. Relevant content increases the value of link it contains and also grows your website traffic through improved user experience.
- As discussed in our blog “Importance of anchor text in Back-links”, relevant keywords in anchor text play an important role in getting higher rank for relevant search terms.
Avoid Paid Links:
Some sites offer you link in return of payment. Buying links is considered as spam technique and Google can remove your website from its index because of having paid links. Paid links have time limit, after certain period the link expires or breaks.
So natural link building is the best way to improve your website rank than paying for links. As Google may penalize paid links and can damage website’s linking profile and brand value.
These are some proven strategies to generate good inbound links. I hope this article will help you to build quality inbound links which will affect your ranking positively. If I’ve missed any strategy then please mention it in comments. Also you can send us any queries regarding this topic or any other digital marketing strategy, we are glad to help you with inbound linking.
