Definition: What is backlink?

In a SEO strategy, obtaining quality backlinks is essential. This will increase a site's reputation index, and will therefore increase its chances of finding itself in Google's top positions. But more concretely, what is backlink?

SEO Strategy: What is backlink?

A backlink is a hypertext link from a site A to a site B. It can be placed on any web page external to your own site. Not to be confused with outgoing links (from your website to another external page) and internal links (from your website to another of your pages). These links can come from anywhere on the Internet; blogs, forums, social networks, etc... and can be placed by anyone: the administrator of a website, a "guest" or by yourself! Having quality backlinks is essential for the visibility of your website. In an SEO strategy there are several methods to obtain it: In a natural way: when an Internet user appreciates your article and decides to talk about you by placing a link on his web page or on a social network. In a netlinking strategy which consists in creating quality backlinks by positioning them on websites with high Trust Flow or Page Rank.

But why are backlinks so important?

Google takes backlinks into consideration. A link is for Google a recommendation made by one website to another. A site with many recommendations (backlinks) is favored over another website. A well placed link also brings additional traffic to its website. Do you find this easy? Be careful, it is not enough to make thousands of links to your site anyhow. There are good and bad backlinks.

What is a good backlink?

Those coming from sites with a very good SEO will bring you much more notoriety and popularity than backlinks that have been placed on sites with a worse SEO than yours. It is therefore much better to obtain backlinks from sites that are better referenced than your own, and moreover, to choose sites listed in the same theme. Nevertheless, some backlinks are to be avoided. In particular links from sites blacklisted by Google, because they do not respect its guideline, or have a very bad reputation on the web. It is best to stay away from these sites. Avoid links defined in rel= "" (= Nofollow Link). They send a signal to search engine robots so that they do not take it into account when they crawl. Basically, Google does not transfer either the PageRank ranking or the anchor text through these links. They will therefore have no impact on the positioning of your page, regardless of the popularity of the site on which you have positioned your backlink.

Netlinking strategy

For netlinking or backlinking to be effective and sustainable, a series of criteria such as the variety of source domains and their themes must be respected. When you post a comment on another website, it is almost always moderated before it is published (or not). So write relevant comments if you don't want to take the risk that it will be deleted. It is therefore preferable to write on blogs that share the same themes as you. Social networks are also very good sources of backlinks.

Check the presence of its backlinks

Knowing how to generate backlinks is a good introduction to netlinking. But we must not stop there. It is important to verify that the links obtained are still in place. Remember to regularly monitor earned and lost links. There are free tools such as Google Search Console to find out about some of the pages that send you link. But not all backlinks are visible in the Search Console. Some paid tools like Majestic SEO are much more complete to analyse your netlinking, link profile and notoriety (Citation Flow and Trust Flow). Majestic offers, for example, a module called Backlink History Checker: it allows you to compare the rate at which backlinks are counted for your domain with those of 5 competing domains. Did you enjoy this article? Give us your opinion in the comments. In the following, I give you 14 techniques to find backlinks and improve your Google ranking.
Taking the path of backlinks finally!
Backlink: techniques to improve netlinking

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