Categories: Technology

4 Quality Backlink Examples And 3 Toxic Ones To Avoid

Backlinking is a practice that’s crucial in the world of SEO. Developing a backlinking strategy is something that all website admins must do. Backlinks are one of the SEO elements that will allow a site to perform well in the Google rankings.

If you hire an SEO agency for backlink services, they will tell you there are certain backlink strategies that work well and others you must avoid. Let’s talk about a few of both right now.

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Author Backlinks

Author backlinks show up on a web page in an author bio box. This is a logical place to put one and is considered a sound SEO technique.

This type of link will often go to an author’s social media profile, a specific landing page, or to the author’s website homepage.

Local Listing Backlinks

Local listing backlinks are placed somewhere on business directory sites. Usually, you will want them in profile listings on places like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Bing Places, or a Google Business profile. These are suitable places for them because these are well-known sites with high domain authority.

Editorial Backlinks

These are good backlinks, but they may not be as obvious as the first two we mentioned. They are natural backlinks that happen when a site owner links to a webpage because of the quality of the content. You don’t trade or buy an editorial link.

Instead, it shows up when a site publishes high-quality content that some other site owner thinks will benefit its readers.

Contextual Backlinks

These are perhaps the most valuable backlinks you can have. They go within the main content of a website. This is different from other places they might logically go, like in a sidebar, header, or footer.

They’re text links that inform the all-important search engine crawlers about the target page’s content.

Link Exchanges That Manipulate Search Rankings

Now, let’s discuss a few toxic backlinking strategies. In SEO’s distant past, some site owners would agree to link exchanges. They would swap links to boost both of their sites.

The problem with this strategy is that Google has long since become wise to it. The algorithm is always on the lookout for this technique, and it will penalize sites that do it.

Low-Authority Sites

Linking to low-authority sites is like a kiss of death if you want your site to rank highly in the SERPs. If a site looks spammy, then chances are it does not have high domain authority. You don’t have to guess about a site’s domain authority, though.

You can figure it out by running a site through a free domain authority checker.

Blog Comment Spam Backlinks

Perhaps the worst backlinks are ones that come to your site through spam comment backlinks. Comments on things like blog posts are usually good, but if the comments are obviously spam, then a link coming from that source will hurt your site more than it helps.

These are to be avoided at all costs.

Keep these techniques in mind when crafting your backlink strategy.