It's often said that you should avoid backlinks altogether because they ruin your rankings. However, this is incorrect. While it's true that the importance of backlinks has decreased somewhat, they are still extremely important and necessary for a good ranking.
The links pointing to your site must not only be popular, but also relevant. This is certainly a very important ranking factor among the roughly 200 other factors that Google uses to evaluate a website.
However, links don't just mean backlinks; internal linking also plays a crucial role.
Number of external links
External links are what we call backlinks. These are links from other websites that point to your site. Google always sees this as a positive reference, provided the linking website is also high-quality. The more high-quality links you have, the better it is for your ranking.
Relevance of external links
As mentioned above, it's not just the number of links that's important, but also their relevance. For example, if your site is about bicycle helmets, a link from a site that also deals with this topic is much more valuable than a link from a site that deals with cars.
Number of internal links
Now we come to internal links. These are links that point from your text to other texts within your domain. If Google sees that a page has a large number of internal links, then Google assumes that this page is very important. But here, too, the linking page is considered. Because if that page has many links, then the internal link also has much more value.
Furthermore, it's crucial that the content on the page and the surrounding links are of high quality. As you can imagine, an internal link from a page with 1000 words is far more valuable than a link from a page with only 25 words.
Relevance of internal links
But here too, thematic relevance plays a major role. Read the section "Relevance of external links" again for more information.
The domain itself
While subpages are also examined, it can be assumed that a domain with many high-quality links enjoys greater trust from Google. Therefore, a link from such a domain is also much more valuable.
We'll come back to that in a moment.
Anchor text
Always pay attention to the anchor text you use. The anchor text should always provide a description of the page. It would therefore be pointless to link this article with anchor text like "Facebook Tips".
Relevance also plays a crucial role here!
Google's trust
Because Google's trust has been abused in the past through illicit methods, rebuilding that trust is now all the more difficult. Therefore, it's crucial that a page linking to you has a very high level of trust with Google. If a page linking to you has a very poor reputation, your trust will decrease, and you'll lose ranking positions.
Broken links
Broken links are a clear sign of whether or not you maintain your website. Google hates it when its crawler encounters too many broken links. Therefore, you should ensure that there aren't too many faulty links on your site. This only demonstrates that you're not truly maintaining the site, and how valuable can such a site be to a searcher?
The link profile
Avoid spam! This means you should try to get as many links as possible from a wide variety of sources. If one source links to a large number of your pages, Google will consider this spam and penalize it. The website may even be penalized for it.
Read our latest article on technical ranking factors here: https://www.analytics-agentur.ch/technische-rankingfaktoren/.
