Backlinks - the Good, the Bad & the Ugly

I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge , hints and tips I've built up over the years . Today , I'm going to talk about backlinks the good , the bad and the ugly . If you're a regular listener to the podcast , you'll probably have noticed that I haven't talked much about backlinks previously .

Now , backlinks just brief definition for those that aren't sure what I'm talking about Anytime another website links to your website , that's called an external backlink and that's the type of backlink I'm going to talk about now . So that's links from other websites to your website . Now , in terms of SEO , these links actually help your SEO .

It's part of Google's ranking algorithm . Part of the page rank algorithm is taking takes into account how many links and what sort of links come from external sites to your site . In general , the more links you've got , the better . There are nuances . Some links are better than others . Some websites give more power when they link to than smaller websites .

There's things like relevance and the anchor text All matter . The more relevant an anchor text is , the more it will help you rank for that similar terms to that , but I'm not going to go into huge details on those this time around .

But I just wanted to say , yeah , backlinks from external websites to your website do count for SEO and it is an important thing . Now , taking this on board , knowing that backlinks are quite important for SEO , you could be tempted to say , well , let's forget about everything else .

Let's just go and get as many backlinks as we can possibly get and get them linking to our website and that will help us rank . We won't need to do anything else . Now , again , that is generally 15 years ago . That was quite accepted . That's what most people did and I did it myself .

If you've listened to some of the podcasts where I talk about the story of broadband code and how we got hit by penalties , I talk about then when , yeah , we just went nuts but you would buy , we paid people to link to us .

We did link spam from forums or we just get people to put forum posts in for us and footer posts and comment posts and all sorts of links and all sorts of really low quality links , and back then it didn't harm you to do that .

Google made noises that didn't want people to do this , because they realized that people just gaining backlinks by any means possible was potentially polluting their algorithm and getting people to rank where they weren't necessarily the best site . They just had the most links and everybody did it .

Then along came Penguin , the Penguin algorithm , and that penalized lots of sites that were buying and creating poor quality links .

And ever since we got hit by Penguin really badly and I've talked about this in other podcast episodes , so I'd say go and listen to them for the full story I made a conscious decision that I wasn't doing that again because we got hit so hard and the recovery took so long and such a risk For me . The risk-reward ratio wasn't there .

Now , before we go any further , I just want to say that I'm not puritanical about how people run their websites and the choices that they make . I've got no problem if people want to buy and sell links . I don't judge people for buying and selling links . That's completely up to them . It's not illegal . Google's terms of services are not the law .

If you break them , then you know there is no , I suppose I'm concerned . There's no moral or legal issue with that , and some people quite happily do it , and I think it's fair enough , as long as everybody on both sides of the equation understands the risks and past potential rewards from it . So I'm not going to be sitting here from a judgy point of view .

I'm literally just saying what my point of view is and the reasons why I make the choices that I do now when it comes to link building . Okay , so now let's start with the good . So the good backlinks are the ones which you naturally receive . These are ones where you don't make any solicitation , you don't make any payment , no persuasion .

These are just the kind of backlinks that people find your site , discover your site and find it valuable enough that they will link to it from their website . It may be because you are sharing some data or providing a tool or something that useful for that person and for their audience .

Now , these links are great because A it's not against Google's terms of service . B they don't cost anything . C they tend to stand there for a long time . The longevity of those links is good . There's no reason for people to go and take them away . So these are the gold standard and that's what I now aim for with any site I produce .

If you go and look at , say , the backlink profile of keywords people use , you know we've done no link building at all for that site . We just built a good product and a good site and it's naturally received links . If you want to see a truly organic backlink profile , go and look at keywords .

People use it's backlink profile in a tool like AHREFS or something like that , and that's what to aim for and there's no risk in that backlink profile . I don't lose sleep worrying . Am I ever going to get caught out for that ? Or is there any ever going to cause me any issues ? Because it's just all completely natural . So that's the good links .

That's the gold standard . They're the very best . That's what I call good and that's what I always aim for myself . Okay , so moving on , what's the bad ? Well , maybe bad's a bit too strong . Maybe it's the more dodgy that iffy links . Now , these are the ones where they look like they are a natural link , but you have made a deal with someone .

You've paid them to link to you . If we look at Google's spam guidelines , which I'll link to in these show notes , these are the ones within those guidelines where you know it's going to be hard when you're just looking at the page to determine that those links have been put there by being paid for .

So things like exchanging money for links or posts that contain links , exchanging goods or services for links , sending someone a product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link , now , yeah , so these are the kind of the dodgy ones . Now , okay , it's hard to tell necessarily that they've been placed with payment .

But I wouldn't be surprised if Google can sort of compare backlink profiles between sites which it doesn't think this is happening and ones where it is happening . And it's a thing like the type of the number and type of links that a site attracts If it's lumpy .

If you're all of a sudden getting links from particular types of sites that you went before and it's just coming in little chunks regularly , then there's little patterns . That where AI in the future , if it's not doing it now , might be able to determine that sort of the growth of a link profile is not necessarily natural .

So whether they can do that at the moment or not is a different matter . That's maybe a future risk , but it's . Those are the kind of the links where you have to tread carefully , I'd say , if you're going to do it and you know the risk is lower , but I think there's always going to be a risk . So then on to the ugly . What are the ugly backlinks ?

Now , these are the ones that you know . You could look at a page , see a backlink on it and go hang on , that's not there . Naturally , these are things like footer links , so bulk footer links in the bottom of a page where it is linking up to unrelated sites with unrelated anchor texts .

You can see it's someone who's controlling this site is just selling that footer text . It can be things like putting spam into comments , spam into forums with links in , and it can be , I think , things . Kneeshedits is one that I always worry about .

That's where people pay to have a backlink inserted in an older article , and things like that can possibly done badly , can look unnatural . Another one would be private blog networks . Now , private blog network , done well and controlled , could potentially drop into the bad rather than ugly category , but a lot of them that I've seen are not done like that .

They're just expired domains with pages full of unrelated posts , stuffed full of backlinks , and it's just people who are controlling those networks , trying to make as much money as possible by selling links on them .

It's those where in the short run , they might work for you , but in the longer run there's the ones that couldn't come back to bite you in the longer run and , trust me , it is so much harder clearing up a link spam mess than just never doing it in the first place .

So yeah , see , those , these ugly ones , are the ones that are really going to cause you issues . And Google do , from time to time , run link spam updates where they actually go around and penalize sites that they think are doing sort of engaging in dodgy link practices . So that's the three types the good , the bad , the ugly .

Now just to go back to my previous point , I do not judge people who use any of these different tactics . It is open for everyone to do what they want . There's no laws broken . I'm not the moral police . It's fine . As I said , I've done these , some of these things in the past and they worked until they didn't .

And again , I think if you went and did it now , if you did some of the more Bad and ugly ones , then yet they they may work for a period , and how long that period is . It could be a short time , could be a long time , but are they likely to work forever ? Probably not , and when the time comes , you gotta , you gotta clear it up .

You just got to be accept that risk . And if you will , in top side that , accept that risk and and take it is , take it for what it is for as long as you can , then fine . But if you I Subscribe to different philosophy now because of the being you know once bit into I shy .

My philosophy now is very much create something great and Make sure that then you concentrate on people linking to you , naturally as your , as your linking strategy . I will do further episodes about the kind of content that actually will attract links . Naturally , it's it's hard to do . It's that easy to put up a website and just put anything on it .

It's harder to make a website which is actually linkable and by people , naturally . But there are , there are patterns there and there's things that you can do and I'll talk about that in a future episodes . Thanks for listening . I really appreciate it . Please subscribe and share . It really helps . Seo is not that hard as bought to you by keywords .

People use calm , the solution to finding the questions people ask online . See where thousands of people users every day try it today for free at give us people use calm . You want to get in touch or have any questions ? I'd love to hear from you . I'm at channel 5 on Twitter . You could email me at podcast at keywords people use calm .

By for now and soon the next episode of SEO . It's not that hard I .