See also: Link Building
When one domain links to another domain that is called an external link. Search Console, Google’s tool for tracking organic performance for a website, calls external links “Links to Your Site”. Links pass link juice or ranking power from one domain to another. The more “popular” a website is, the more their links to your site will impact your search engine rankings. Many top SEO gurus believe that links are the most important source of ranking power. There are many factors that influence the value a link will have on your website. Here are the most important:
- The trustworthiness of the linking domain
- The popularity of the linking page (the more quality links to a website, the more popular that website is)
- The relevance of the content between their page and the your page (if cars.com links to your site which is about used cars, it’s a more relevant link)
- The anchor text used in the link. Anchor text is the actual text used in the link itself.
- The number of links to the same page on the source page.
- The ownership relationship between the source and the target domains. For example, if you own both Site A and Site B, and you link from Site A to Site B, that link won’t be worth much.
One of the main things Google is looking for when looking at links is that there aren’t black hat practices in the link building. If all the links to one page have the exact targeted keyword as the anchor text, then Google is going to think that is unnatural and either penalize or not count those links.
Another thing to look for is the domain to link ratio. It is good to have at least 1 unique domain for every 10 total links. If one domain is linking to the same website 2,000 times, that looks really unnatural and Google is likely going to penalize or not count those links.
In the past, an effective way to counteract bad links was to send a disavow file to Google. Basically, you would compile a list of domains that are sending bad links to your site and upload that list to Search Console. This would tell Google that you don’t want links from these domains to count for or against you because they seem to be spammy and unnatural. This practice, however, may not be as useful now. Google is moving towards not giving any credence to spammy links rather than penalizing them. While it may slightly help to do a disavow, you also may disavow links that are having a positive impact on your website. Disavowing these positive links would likely hurt overall results. As with any SEO practice, this may change again in the future.
Getting links naturally is the best way to achieve a good link profile, but it’s not always the quickest or easiest way. Another way that we employ is through a reputable service known as The Hoth. The Hoth creates blog posts about certain topics that link to chosen pages of our client’s websites. They are our primary tool in generating links. Again, this may change in the future.