Are you ready to maximize your SEO performance?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gives businesses an opportunity to boost their online visibility.

There are many factors that influence a successful SEO campaign. These include content, social media, and web design.

At the top of this list is link building.

Content optimized for search engine use has a healthy backbone of links. In fact, high-quality links can be the key to generating the right results with any SEO campaign.

There are a variety of SEO link building tools at your disposal when it comes to honing your SEO link strategy.

In this post, we’ll look at the tools you won’t want to overlook as you optimize your content!

1. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the best SEO link building tools available to businesses and consumers. It offers businesses competitive analysis and content research. It also enables users to effectively research backlinks.

In fact, Ahrefs has the world’s largest index of backlinks. Ahrefs’ powerhouse web crawlers update this index every fifteen minutes.

What’s more, backlink research is easy and effective with Ahrefs. Users simply type their URL into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer tool. Once they do, they receive instant data on total backlinks and other key metrics related to site SEO.

This platform is ideal for business owners keen to perform competitive link analysis. This enables them to compare backlink performance with that of industry competitors.

In fact, with Ahrefs’ assistance, you can explore contextual link opportunities. These links are most likely to leverage your current content.

Users can also examine link quality of competitors’ sites. It is possible to analyze your own low-quality or lost links with Ahrefs, too.

Additionally, Ahrefs makes it easy to track your link building campaign. It generates comprehensive reports that show referrals and other opportunities.

Ahrefs may constitute a significant investment for users. But it is one of the more valuable SEO link building tools available to experts and amateurs alike.

2. BuzzSumo

BBuzzSumo is a critical resource when it comes to SEO link building tools. Users will love what it does for link prospecting.

Link prospecting is all about time-intensive research. It identifies publications and guest posting opportunities. These can provide a high-quality foundation of backlinks.

Some business owners take link prospecting into their own hands. But doing so can often take more time than it is worth. This is where BuzzSumo enters the scene (in flying colors).

BuzzSumo enables users to build a list of influencers, bloggers, writers, and experts. These individuals are relevant to a business’s aims.

Users track interactions with these prospects as they search for link building opportunities.

Marketers are also more likely to pitch relevant publications when using BuzzSumo. The tool allows users to analyze trending content and organize influencers based on niche interests.

BuzzSumo can be integral to any marketer’s scorecard of effective link building techniques.

3. LinkedIn

A lot of marketers overlook social media when composing an SEO link strategy. However, social media gives marketers powerful opportunities for engaging with influencers and partners.

LinkedIn is the social media giant of professional online networking. It is an ideal resource for most any professional activity, but it can also play a handy role in your link building efforts.

Use LinkedIn to easily gather contact information for journalists, bloggers, influencers, and CEOs and directly reach out to this individuals through LinkedIn’s InMail system. This can prove valuable in the link prospecting phase of link building campaigns.

Through LinkedIn, a link prospector can acquire scores of emails and use these in programmed link building outreach.

4. BuzzStream

Once link prospecting is underway, it’s key to actively manage your outreach efforts. For outreach management, BuzzStream is one of the better SEO link building tools available.

If you’re still prospecting, BuzzStream enables users to quickly and effectively research prospects. But it is best known for its ability to handle outreach without having to configure multiple emails and campaigns.

Use BuzzStream to easily manage bulk emails and track campaign performance. With BuzzStream’s help, marketers can also gather contact information from domains, which immediately get imported into contact lists.

BuzzStream’s campaign performance metrics enable users to hone existing campaigns based off of clickthrough and open rates.

The best part about BuzzStream’s outreach is how personalized you can make your efforts. Bulk emails through BuzzStream aren’t likely to come across as spam.

In fact, BuzzStream claims that its outreach management is “relationship-based.”

5. Majestic

Majestic offers much that Ahrefs and SEMRush provide users, but it should still be on your list of SEO link building tools.

This is because Majestic specifically addresses SEO professionals, developers, and media analysts in the tools it offers. You can trust link-building platforms that keep SEO at the fore (because that’s what links are all about).

Majestic can back up any link indexing you’ve already performed with its extensive link database. Detect backlink history, gather URL Search Scores, and analyze link intelligence API.

Majestic users will appreciate the platform’s ability to identify relevant domains and also rank their trust factor. This can aid in link prospecting optimization and targeted outreach.

Much like Ahrefs, Majestic enables business owners to get a glimpse of their competitors’ linking strategies. This can help them step up their own link building game.

Your Guide to Expert SEO Link Building Tools

Link building is an integral part of any SEO campaign, and should not be taken lightly. When crafting your link strategy, be sure to rely on competitive SEO link building tools.

Ahrefs, in particular, consistently wows marketers looking for competitive link building opportunities. Majestic offers similar capacities with its domain index, backlink profiles, and URL search scores.

Don’t neglect BuzzSumo or BuzzStream for link prospecting and outreach. LinkedIn can be effective at gathering prospect contact information.

At BackLinks.com, we offer link building experts of all industries a fast and effective means of establishing link equity today. Improve your SERP’s with high-quality, one-way text links.

Anyone who’s into SEO knows about PageRank and Domain Authority. As far as you know, these terms are very important and worth considering when developing your optimization strategy.

But if you’re like most people, you’re a bit confused about what the two are. We all know they have something to do with ranking websites. And since SEO is all about reaching the top of search engine results pages (SERPs), it makes sense to care about anything to do with page ranking and authority.

These two were frequently used as an SEO rank checker to determine the effectiveness of your online marketing. However, if you’re still confused about what PageRank and Domain Authority are and what place they really have in SEO, then continue reading.

We’ll uncover some of the similarities and differences between the two, as well as why PR should no longer be your go-to SEO rank checker.

So What is PageRank?

PageRank is nothing more than an algorithm created by Google. It was written up by Larry Page (hence the name PageRank), which is designed to measure links and link equity.

The way it measures a site is by determining how many links are pointing to it. Then it goes and measures the authority of the sites linking to the site. This is to prevent link farms from abusing the system.

The higher the quality of the inbound links, the higher your PageRank. This was a goldmine for many SEO heads who took full advantage of this new algorithm. And for a while, it worked. At least, until Google decided to stop updating PR data.

Before this happened, webmasters and users would determine the trustworthiness of a site based on its PageRank.

Today, PR updates very infrequently – about two times a year. We only expect for it to phase out completely in the near future.

Of course, this tool is still beneficial to Google’s internal algorithm, but it’s become useless in the public domain.

And speaking of domains, let’s move on to what is Domain Authority.

What is Domain Authority?

Since Google fell through on its PageRank tool, Moz.com decided to create its own version of a page ranker. This tool is a metric that determines the value of websites using logarithmic calculations to identify authority.

The top rank you can have is 100. However, you’ll find that rising up from 30 to 35 is much easier than it is to go from 80 to 85. Unranked websites have a DA of 0.

There are various SEO tools you can use that show the Domain Authority of websites.

Now, one difference about Domain Authority as an SEO rank checker is that it has a wider range of metrics.

Let’s review.

The Metrics Domain Authority Uses as an SEO Rank Checker

Next, we’ll go into the various metrics that Domain Authority uses to rank websites.

The Number of Quality Inbound & Outbound Links

As we already discussed, the quality of the links pointing to and from a site will determine its page ranking. It’s the same with DA.

Domain Registration Info

If the site owner has 10, 20 or 30 sites and uses those for backlinks, then it will hurt their site’s authority. This is a blackhat method and you’ll get penalized for it. Once DA detects this, it will demote your ranking.

The age of your domain is also important – the longer your site’s been around, the better.

Link Diversity

Here’s where quality over quantity comes into play. It’s better to have a few links pointing to your site from a wider array of valuable sites than to have a bunch of links coming in from just a handful of sites.

Temporal & Valuable Distribution

DA also looks at how much traffic your site receives over time. It doesn’t count if you get a sudden influx of traffic one day – DA will determine if this was due to a viral piece of content or purchased traffic.

Then if your site has lots and lots of web pages, it will determine the value of them. For instance, if 75 of the 100 pages have moderate value (determined by traffic and links), it will rank higher than a site with only 10 pages of the 100 with moderate value.

Traffic, Hardware & Software Metrics

This includes how many return visitors your site has, the pageviews per visitor, how long they spend on pages and your bounce rate. The better the engagement, the better it is for your ranking.

Then for your hardware and software, DA looks at your server response times, uptime, page errors and broken links. Website maintenance is key if you want to impress Domain Authority.

Which is Better as an SEO Rank Checker?

Well, we’ll let you be the judge – let’s take a look at the differences that really set DA apart from PageRank:

• Domain Authority is actively used, PageRank isn’t
• DA ranks individual pages, not the entire site like PR
• Google calculates PR, DA is a 3rd party
• PR doesn’t directly influence your SERP ranking, DA measures that relationship
• PR only measures the influence of links, DA uses a variety of metrics
• PR doesn’t update, DA updates multiple times monthly
• PR measures sites 0 to 10, DA measures sites 0 to 100
• DA’s algorithm continues to evolve, PR is diminishing in value

Hands down, DA is the winner when it comes to checking SEO rankings. Your DA ranking is determined by many of the same factors that determine your position in the SERPs.

It measures your SEO, engagement, and popularity. If you can get all around great metrics, then your Domain Authority will increase.

In a nutshell, DA is active and uses a more comprehensive metric system. This makes having a higher DA more impressive than a high PR. Google is already putting PR on the shelf, maybe it’s time we do the same.

Get Quality Backlinks for Your Website

Now that you have a better idea of Domain Authority and PageRank, it’s time to start building backlinks that’ll boost your DA score. It’s the ideal tool to verify the performance of your link building strategies.

Much of this may be new to you and you may not have the time to learn the ins and outs. This is where we come in. At BackLinks, we help businesses build links using automation methods.

If you’re interested in quickly building quality links to your site, then contact us today!

EDU websites are the holy grail of link building, but how easy are they to get?

Typically, you can earn backlinks through online publishing platforms, blogger outreach, the broken link method, infographics, and even Wikipedia links. But earning an EDU backlink is a different type of challenge.

So what’s The solution? Scholarship link building. Follow along as we walk you through your first EDU backlink.

Step #1: Don’t Forget It’s a Real Scholarship

Authenticity is essential for scholarship link building. If it’s obvious you’re creating a scholarship for DA scores, you can kiss your EDU link building campaign goodbye.

You’re creating a real scholarship for students. Put effort into crafting a legitimate, authentic reward that aligns with your brand. If your niche is marketing, you could create a scholarship for aspiring marketers, web designers, or business professionals.

Step #2: Make it Official

Again, authenticity is key. That’s why you need a professional landing page for your scholarship.

Your landing page should include:

• A detailed explanation of your scholarship
• The scholarship reward amount
• Legal terms and stipulations for scholarship recipients
• Scholarship application requirements

Optional content ideas include an animated explainer video, frequently asked questions, and applicant surveys to improve your scholarship link building efforts moving forward.

It’s critical to be as precise as possible with this step. Colleges and universities will scrutinize your scholarship information with a fine-toothed comb.

Step #3: Reach out to Financial Aid Offices – All of Them

Once you have your scholarship, shop it around. For this step, you’ll need to gather financial aid contacts to create a massive email list.

First thing’s first: who’s in charge? You need to get in touch with decision-makers. Do your best to gather contacts for financial aid directors, assistant directors, and directors for scholarships and grants.

If there are no top-tier contacts available, try managers, coordinators, and administrative assistants. Most financial aid offices have a general email address available as well.

Step #4: Build Your Financial Aid Contact List

List-building can be a massive undertaking, but with the right tools, you can cut your time in half or even more.

Here are several tips, tools, and tricks to make your life easier:

• Email scraping tools
• Crowdsource your contact research
• Scrape the web for college and university websites
• Gather contacts via social media

Don’t forget to keep your contacts organized in a spreadsheet for future scholarship link building campaigns.

Step #5: Email Your Financial Aid Contacts

This step is so important because you want your scholarship approved as quickly as possible. However, you may need to perform two or even three rounds of outreach to successfully have your backlink posted. This is another reason why you need to create a legitimate scholarship with substance.

If you faithfully follow steps 1 through 3, chances are good that your scholarship will pass muster. Plus, you don’t have to spend a lot of time personalizing each outreach email. Since you’re presenting the same scholarship to each institution, you can use a template!

Make sure your scholarship requirements are clearly visible and easy to find on your landing page. Don’t write a long email either. Keep it short, to the point, and include a bullet-point list description of your scholarship’s benefits.

Step #5: Email and Track

Scholarship link building requires a high-volume contact list, so tracking your progress is essential. You don’t want to keep bugging an institution that’s already posted your backlink!

Make a spreadsheet of all your EDU link prospects, along with DA scores, contact information, outreach dates, and backlink progress notes. Don’t forget to regularly check your backlinks to make sure they’re still there.

Step #6: Pick Your Scholarship Recipients

Once your scholarship is posted, expect a flood of applicants. You should also create a spreadsheet containing the applicants’ names, schools, transcripts, scholarship essays, and other pertinent information. This will help you choose your recipients wisely.

Remember, trust and credibility are huge factors here. You don’t want to go into these decisions lightly. When worthy applicants don’t receive scholarships, you run the risk of damaging your scholarship’s reputation online – and that’s a whole other SEO problem to deal with!

Calling your winners personally with the good news goes a long way as well.

Step #7: Reap the PR Rewards!

Scholarship link building is great for your DA score, but it’s also a public relations win. Why? 90% of American consumers trust brands that give back to the community over those that don’t.

So make sure to broadcast your scholarship (and winners) loud and clear on your blog, social media, and local publications. Great PR will lead to even more backlinks, so it’s a win-win.

Step #8: Analyze Your Scholarship Link Building Campaign

No link building campaign is complete without analysis. You need insight into where you went wrong, what you did right, and link building opportunities to pursue.

You may have to tweak your outreach email, reassess your scholarship terms, or redesign your landing page. Don’t be afraid to up your social media game either.

Before you get to work on your scholarship link building, let’s recap all eight steps:

1. Brainstorm a trustworthy and relevant scholarship idea
2. Create an official landing page for your scholarship
3. Reach out to financial aid offices
4. Build an organized contact list
5. Create your outreach email template
6. Inform the winners
7. Look for extra PR opportunities
8. Analyze your results (and watch those backlinks like a hawk)

What’s Next?

As with all SEO campaigns, the more you do it, the easier it will become. Don’t wait too long to get started on your link building, as algorithms can change at a moment’s notice!

For more even tips on improving your backlink profile, check out our latest posts on email link building and development.

When was the last time you checked your link profile? Does your site’s management team know how to use tools like Ahrefs to organize an effective link building strategy?

If not, it’s time to consider pairing up with an expert link building company to do the job for you. This allows you to give the best customer experience and benefit your business in many ways. At the same time, you can save money and allocate resources better.

Do you need more reasons to work with a link building company? Here are seven benefits:

1. Improved Domain and Page Authority

Google determines the rank of your website based on the quantity and the quality of inbound links. Page authority is the subjective measure of this quality while domain authority measures your website as a whole. The higher your domain authority, the higher your rank depending on the specific search terms you’re aiming for.

Working with a link building agency helps you get more relevant links that point back to your domain. It helps your business become more invested in the quality of your link building campaign. This makes all your website pages rank higher in organic search results.

2. More Referral Traffic

This is one of the most obvious yet the most forgotten benefits of working with a link building company.

Don’t forget that the agency already has affiliations with other blogs and businesses. They can use this resource to your advantage, adding guest blogs to those affiliates to build your link profile in an efficient manner.

The links you get from your link building campaign exist for life and readers of the content can click on them. When the users who check your material want to learn more about the topic, they can follow the link back to your website without difficulty.

The more layers you add to your link building strategy, the more referral traffic you get. Sometimes, the referral traffic can get you more value than organic search rankings.

3. Increased Brand Visibility

When you work with a link building agency to help get you links through guest posts, it gives your business more exposure to readers.

Using these publishing sources is easy since most of them look for new content so it’s a fair trade. They get content while you get free advertising with an audience that might not have heard about your business before.

More visibility is always a good thing. It leads to more people recognizing your brand. This can get more people to give you more direct traffic in the future.

4. More Brand Authority

Link building is another reason to post as an industry thought leader. It’s a good way to motivate you to publish a strong, thorough content on relevant publishers and let link building companies handle the links. Readers of these publishers will see your business as an authority and become more inclined to click on the links that lead to your website.

Even doing three or four high-quality articles can get readers interested in your website. This helps you get even more referral traffic. It helps increase your conversion rates and make your customers trust your business more.

5. Industry Authorities Exposure

When you use guest posting to build your link network with a link building company, you’ll get to read what other influencers in the industry write. This allows you to know what to write and help your link building efforts. It can attract these experts to write as guest posters on your site too, driving their audience to your brand.

Link building with an expert can lead you to have free content from these influencers. It allows you to have a greater connection with your audience and other authorities in your industry.

6. Competitive Edge

Links are public and you can’t hide or mask them in any way. In fact, there are a lot of tools out there that let you see where the links point to, whether it’s to your site or to your competitor’s.

When you do this with a link building company, you can make a strategic competitor analysis that lets you know where your competition gets their links. This can help you target the same sources if they’re authoritative and helps increase your website’s reliability.

7. Lifetime Investment

Unlike the use of paid ads or other traditional digital marketing and SEO methods, investing links through a link building company lasts as long as the link you used remains active.

When you use paid ads, you give rent on a monthly or a yearly basis to have a temporary boost on your visibility. Links get you a more or less permanent placement which continues to direct referral traffic to your website.

The lifetime of links is long since most web pages they’re stored in can last for years. The more authoritative the website is, the less likely it is for it to go away any time soon. Link building is the same as building home equity while buying paid ads is something similar to paying the rent for an apartment.

As with any house, you can choose to do the link building on your own. There are a lot of ways out there to help you build your links. But coordinating with a link building company is like hiring professional contractors to build a strong house that can survive the test of time.

Get a Good Link Building Company Today!

Link building with professionals can become one of the greatest business investments you can make. Often, you can become so focused on other SEO or digital marketing strategies and forget a lot of the benefits of link building. If you wish to build your links, it’s not the best idea for you to do it alone.

Do you need help building a good backlink network? We can help. We have the expertise and the latest strategies that can help you build your links in an efficient and professional manner.

Are you ready to start? Contact us today and let us help you.

Do you want to improve your website’s SEO?

Consider investing time in building links. It improves your profile and your site’s standing with Google. The good thing is there are many ways to achieve this.

One of the fastest ways to connect to website owners is through email outreach.

This method has a bad rep – maybe because people don’t like receiving emails from strangers at all. There’s also the issue of spammers who send an email every minute.

However, if you do it right, getting SEO backlinks through email will give your website a significant boost in rankings.

So, how do you do it right in the first place?

Well, the bottom line is to provide value. Want to learn more? Dive in and let us teach you the right way to connect through email.

Publish Quality Content

Google doesn’t only rank your post based on the number of SEO backlinks but to the quality of these backlinks too. A backlink from a high-ranking website means more to search engines than another one from a smaller player.

The way to get backlinks from the big players is to impress them with your content. They’re not going to add a link to their website just because you begged them to. The article you’re trying to pitch should add value not only to the webmaster but to their readers as well.

Find a Relevant Website

To start reaching out to webmasters, find websites within your niche first. You won’t want to get backlinks from a house repair website if you’re dealing with cars.

Next, scour each website to find a post on the same subject as your own. Make sure that the article you pitch fits in a way that it’s not a rehash of the article. Instead, it should fit like a puzzle, adding a missing but substantial information.

Send Customized Emails

The next step is then to contact the webmasters of these websites and create an email. Send a personalized email that shows:

• You know them
• You did your research
• You’re offering them something

The big names know how to spot automated emails. They also know how to treat them: send to trash in a second’s notice.

An automated email is one that follows a template. If you want them to not treat your outreach email as trash, exert a little effort in knowing whom you’re talking to.

Do they like doing speeches? Mention that.

Are they fans of certain bloggers? Hey, you might be a fan, too!

You’ll find out these bits of information if you research well. Read their articles and visit their social media pages to learn more about them.

When the webmaster reads your email, it should encourage them to visit your website or blog post. If you followed tip #1, they should then find your post interesting.

But that’s not all it takes to make them add SEO backlinks to your article. You want them to link to you, but what are they getting in return?

Consider to incorporate these into your outreach:

Offer to Write Free Content

One way to get their attention is to pitch a good idea and to offer to write it.

Make sure you do diligent research first when taking this route. You don’t want to pitch an article that the website has already published in the past.

You might have to lurk on their website for a bit so you can be sure that you’re proposing a fresh idea. You may also offer to write an update about a published article or new angles about the subject.

Mention Them or Their Article

This one requires more effort as you might have to publish a new article based on the webmaster. You may write an article that features them as an expert on the subject before you send an email. Or you can write an article that uses their data.

Once you do, after making sure you followed tip #1, write them an email about it. Mention that you featured them and/or their data, and ask them what they think about it. You may also ask them to check it out and see if you missed any important data.

Bloggers also love hearing from their avid readers. Prove you are one by offering an educated opinion on an article of theirs. It can be different from their own, but all you need is to pique their interest.

Another way is to tell a little story of how you used their advice and how it helped you. Write a blog post about it, then ask them to check it out. If they like it enough, they may update their article with a link to yours.

Provide New Data

You can add value to their article by providing them with new data that you compiled yourself. It may be from an interview you’ve done. You might also have done some serious research that allows you to shed more light on the subject.

Of course, don’t divulge them all in the email. Include a tidbit of the results of your own research that’s valuable and relevant to their niche.

Write a Meaningful Email

You know what to add to your email, but do you know how to build it? Take more care in writing your subject and the body of your email.

First off, keep your subject lines short and sweet. You don’t need to construct a complete thought, but it should be what your email is about.

For instance, you want to offer new and valuable data about SEO backlinks. Your subject line should be along the lines of, “SEO backlinks 2018 data.”

Notice that it’s casual? It should be just like that – like sending an email to a friend.

Another thing to keep in mind is that flattery gets you nowhere. It’s easy to spot fake flattery in email form, so you should lay it off with the compliments.

Rather, mention how the article or the webmaster has affected your life in a positive way. For example, you may mention that you got more backlinks thanks to the article.

Follow Up Just Once

It’s easy for an email to get lost in the webmaster’s inbox, especially if you have had a bad timing. Feel free to send a follow-up just to make sure that it reached the recipient.

However, don’t send multiple follow-ups. The webmaster may not show interest, hence why you’re not getting a response. Maintain realistic expectations and you won’t get disappointed.

You may try again with a new pitch further down the line. By the second time, you’ll be more knowledgeable and you’ll be able to create a more compelling email.

Learn More About SEO Backlinks

There are a lot more ways to build backlinks aside from email outreach.

Interested to further advance your website rankings? Visit our website for resources or contact us now and let us provide solutions for you!

Have you been avoiding nofollow links while working on your SEO?

You might be surprised to learn that nofollow SEO links actually have their place and time. Once you understand nofollow links better, you can learn how to use nofollow links to your advantage, instead of writing off these opportunities.

In this essential guide, we’ll go over what nofollow SEO links can do for your website.

Keep reading to learn more!

Why Use Nofollow SEO Links?

Links are an essential part of SEO. However, not all links are quite the same. You might have a handle on backlinks, internal links, and external links. However, nofollow links are another story.

The truth is that it takes a mix of different kinds of links to make a successful SEO strategy, and nofollow links are just as much a part of the strategy as the rest.

What makes a link nofollow, and why are they so useful? Let’s get into it.

Every link gets crawled or “followed” by a search engine by default, unless you give instructions otherwise. The way to instruct a search engine not to crawl a link is to use the nofollow attribute.

This attribute is a small piece of HTML code that reads as:

Generally speaking, you want Google to follow the links you post. If those links are relevant and useful to readers, Google won’t punish your blog.

However, nofollow links can be helpful for certain types of links that Google will punish. Now, let’s take a look at what those are.

1. Product Links

Similarly, you should always nofollow links to a product that you put on your website. Sometimes, you might agree to place links on your site in exchange for a company’s service or product, but just be sure to nofollow them every time.

2. Review Links

For standard, unpaid review links, you can use regular follow links. But for paid review links you’ll want to make them nofollow every time. If you allow the links to products you were paid to review to be followed, Google will punish you.

3. Affiliate Links

The same goes for affiliate links. If you’ll get money from sales that use the links you post, always make them nofollow.

Google recognizes affiliate links as potential sources of revenue, which is why it punishes follow affiliate links. Google uses this to discourage sites from using affiliate schemes – but if you’re going to do it, just make the links nofollow.

4. Shady Links

If, for some reason, you have a link to a shady or untrustworthy site on your blog, make sure it’s nofollow so you don’t get punished for that site’s behavior.

What’s an untrustworthy site? Any site in an industry known for spam, or a site with poorly constructed content. These low-quality websites will negatively impact your search rankings otherwise.

5. Noindexed Links

If you noindex one of your links, it’s important that you nofollow it too.

Noindex links prevent pages from showing up in Google searches, even if it’s linked to. This allows you to control which pages can be accessed on your site. If you don’t want these low-quality links messing up your rankings, be sure to add the nofollow tag as well.

6. Links Used in Images or Widgets

You should also turn any links that your feature in your widgets or images into nofollow SEO links.

For example, if you’re going to feature an icon with a link on a third-party website, make sure that it’s a nofollow link. Otherwise, Google may see it as a link scheme and punish your site.

7. Guest Post Links

Google has stated that it punishes guest posting for SEO purposes. If you want to avoid Google’s wrath, just make sure to make those links nofollow.

8. Admin Pages

There are some standard pages on your site that Google never needs to follow, including your cart, privacy, login, terms of use, and so on. Go ahead and make those nofollow SEO links.

9. Social Media Buttons

If you include social media share buttons on your site, you’ll want to nofollow those as well.

In this case, Google isn’t going to punish you for having them as follow links. However, you don’t want to be giving precious link equity to outside websites, especially massive social media sites.

The Importance of Nofollow SEO Links

Let’s dig deeper into why these nofollow strategies are important.

Google claims that it won’t transfer anchor text or PageRank on links that are marked as nofollow. However, Google is known for not always abiding by the rules it sets.

Sometimes, Google may actually follow and register links that are marked “nofollow.” For example, all the links on Wikipedia are marked nofollow. However, a backlink from Wikipedia makes a huge difference in a site’s rankings, hinting that Google does follow some nofollow links after all.

The reason for this is probably because Google knows a massive site like Wikipedia wouldn’t use low-quality or spammy links, so it automatically counts Wikipedia links instead.

This means that links from valued websites might be followed, no matter how they’re tagged.

Of course, even if nofollow links actually aren’t followed by Google, they can still be followed by web users. Every link can bring potential customers to your site and translate into valuable conversions.

Nofollow links that bring great traffic is an important part of a solid SEO strategy. Links also build more links, of all kinds. So, nofollow links can eventually translate into dofollow links, especially if they come from a valuable site.

Ready to Use Nofollow Links?

Nofollow links get a bad rap, but they’re actually an important part of your SEO strategy.

Be sure to strategically mark the right links as nofollow, while also welcoming nofollow links from reputable sites if you can get them. With this approach, you’ll be growing your traffic in no time.

Want to get help building links? You don’t have to do it alone – check out why you should use a link building agency here.

According to Google, backlinks are 1 of 3 top ranking signals. Without them, your amazing site will have no chance of being seen. You turn to building links as a way to boost your rankings. But what can you really expect?

How do backlink experts capture those page 1 spots?

One incredibly vital component to their success is that they understand how backlinks really work. They can, therefore, more effectively manage their own expectations and those of their clients.

Can you? Let’s explore the truth about backlinks and how managing expectations will help you develop a winning long-term strategy.

1. Attracting Links Naturally is a Catch 22

What the goals of all webmasters who invest in quality content? They want to create link-magnet content. Who can blame them? Even though they have to invest in this content, these somehow seem like “gimme links”.

And influencers we won’t mention by name tell them that this is how links get built.

This is an admirable goal and we’re not saying you shouldn’t create amazing content that people want to link to. That’s important.

The problem arises when people expect their content to be so “linkable” that they envision moving up in the ranks fast with only natural links.

Natural link building takes time. And acquiring natural links is nearly impossible if you’re not already ranking. This catch 22 leaves a lot of aspiring link-builders feeling frustrated and lied to.

But by managing expectations and building links naturally as part of your overall strategy for acquiring links, you can succeed.

2. Crawling Takes Time

You’re not new to SEO, websites, or building links. But like all people, you want to see results fast. As we discuss managing expectations, it’s important to make this point.

Links must be crawled by search engines before they’ll begin giving you that boost you’re looking for.

They may not all appear at once — even from the same domain. It may take some time for all backlinks to be recognized and weighted by the big players like Google.

Start building. Keep building. And as the links appear in tools like Google search console, you’ll start to see the fruits of your labor.

3. Recognize Tool Limitations

Even some of the most trusted tools like Moz, AhRefs, SEMrush and so on have their limitations. Search engines like Google have massive resources at their disposal.

Google has indexed over 130 trillion pages. It indexes and re-indexes billions each day. Top tools will attempt to capture as many links as possible. But to find all links, you’d need to use multiple tools.

It’s important to realize that you probably have more links that you can account for. What really matters is the results you achieve from these links — not whether you can account for them.

4. You May See Results Before You’ll See Links

Because of the limitations in some of these tools, you may see a small ranking boost before the links actually appear in most tools. Others may take more time to realize.

As you invest in building links over the long term, you realize compounded results.

5. High DA Links May Not Give You the Boost You Expect

You want high authority links. Link authority is a known ranking factor. But links should also be relevant.

Relevant links don’t have to come from a website that does exactly what you do. That wouldn’t be normal. But the context at a page or at least a paragraph level should be there to be of most value to you.

If you have people offering to sell you thousands of high DA links, but they’ve no concern for the relevance of those links — beware.

Authority + Relevance = Great Link …Assuming it’s “do follow”, of course.

6. The Law of Diminishing Returns Applies

As an SEO or webmaster, you know how difficult it can be to build partnerships with other webmasters for building links.

Whether you’re capitalizing on mentions or writing guest posts, outreach to thousands can result in a handful of websites willing to work with you.

Because of this, you may want to make the most of that relationship. You might want to acquire as many links as possible from that one domain. But unfortunately, diminishing returns apply.

That first link might give you a great boost. But each subsequent one will only give you a fraction of the link juice.

Diversity is important. 100 links from one high DA site doesn’t hold the same weight as 100 links from various relevant websites.

Working with someone who’s already built partnerships with thousands of sites relevant to your industry is the way to get the best return on your investment.

7. Sustainable Results Take Time

Even some professionals have this idea that they’re going to get that magical backlink from a 95 DA website and suddenly they’ll shoot to a number 1 spot. If only it worked like that.

While it’s 100% true that a 95 DA backlink can strongly impact your rankings, there are many factors that impact ranking like:

• Age of your website
• How visitors are responding to your UX
• Competitors
• Content quality
• Industry/Niche

As well as things we discussed like:

• Link profile diversity
• Relevance
• Follow or Not

That’s why the best strategy for building links is a long-term comprehensive strategy that builds on itself to pay you back exponentially over the long-term.

Building Links for Long-Term Success

Natural link-building is important. But as a stand-alone link building strategy, it just doesn’t work. If people can’t find you, they can’t link to you.

Google is crawling billions of pages a day. It can take time for it to find all of your links. And the tools you use may take even longer to find your links. That’s why setting realistic long-term goals is key to your success.

Acquiring 1000’s of non-descript links may seem like the answer. But if those links aren’t authority, relevant, do follow links, they only look good on paper.

At Backlinks.com we make it easy to get the right kinds of backlinks fast. Get diverse, relevant, authority, do follow links now. Set up a free account to start improving your SERPs today.