Let’s look at SEO Links
I am not going to use ChatGPT by the way, I used it on one of my previous posts, I’ll give a pint to anyone who spots which one, suffice to say that it has been one of my most popular even leading to a few enquiries. I hear you say – why then not use ChatGPT – simply it’s not human, people can easily spot the difference and are actually suspicious. The one enquiry I did get was from a company that only wanted to use ChatGPT and you need to ask why would they want to do that. Sure the world is progressing, but taking the human element out of everything all the time is not really progress – is it?
So looking at SEO Links – those were the days. For the uninitiated, a great way to get recognised by Google and thereby climb the Google search rankings to get a better position and be visited more often is to build your website’s profile on other people’s websites.
I like to think of this as one of the founding ideas of the Internet. You would talk about your bit, what you knew. And then link to the next resource in the chain. For more details, you could benefit your readers with links to their websites and so on.
Of course, that concept has been trashed by the likes of Facebook and Amazon who would prefer to separate you from everyone else and keep you on their website only. There’s no question Amazon would send you to other websites if they were out of stock of a particular product for example.
But Links to your website remain invaluable for your SEO.
Why Links are important
It makes total sense. If people link to your website that is a great indicator that your website is a good one. People will link if they like it.
Google has worked this out and is now able to suggest that popular websites should be ranked higher in their search results. Quite simply, good websites should be at the top. So Google callees this link authority, the more respected your website is the more Google will promote it.
A Bit of Link History
Google initially thought – wow – links are a good thing – so they ranked websites on how many links they had… the result was a free for all rush for links, with whole website dedicated to links. All they did was link random websites often on just a single page. A few became a bit more sophisticated and categorised websites, but generally links to your website could appear anywhere.
Google then suggested – hang on, everyone is linking to anyone for no good reason. Stop. Now we will only promote websites that link to each other, i.e. reciprocal links. The idea here was to ensure if you wanted a link from another website – you would be willing to link to them. This certainly killed off a lot of linking websites that were genuinely wasting resources.
After a while, every website had a links page, but it did not really do anything. It was a sort of hidden page at the bottom somewhere and the links were often random and disconnected. Google had to think again. Their answer, around 10 years ago now, was to measure link relevancy in far greater details and the rest they say is history.
Todays Link Relevancy
Today, the content has to be linked for the link to count. If you sell car parts the best links you can get are ones that relate to car parts. If you sell flowers the best websites are from people that recommend you buy flowers.
There are now a few grades of links that we might like to think of.
- True Content-Related Links – these are the genuine article, where the leaders in your industry write about you on their websites and link to you.
- Authoritative Links – these are links from hyper well-respected websites – such as Wikipedia – if you are the best in your field then it’s possible to be referenced as such on Wikipedia or specialist websites that contain knowledge of your field.
- Media/Press Links – these are popular and probably in the domain of your PR agency. A link from the BBC is gold dust to any website owner and can last years, other examples can be any mainstream Newspaper, Timeout, local newspapers and so on.
- Social Media – links are Okay – in that you can get others to talk about you on their Posts and Tweets etc. if they do – Google will be watching and you may get a boost especially if it’s a popular link. This is the Influencer boost you are looking for.
- Directory Links – the likes of Yell, Yelp and Free Index are still important in terms of links, it’s difficult to ascertain who uses these services, but Google trusts them and thus they are considered authoritative to a certain degree.
Now that the types of Links have been established what happens to the old Links?
Dealing with Old Links with Disavow Files
Google went one step further during its experiments with links – it actually started to penalise websites with large numbers of links if they were not used, were irrelevant or spammy. Websites may well have built up thousands of links and to see a website with 200,000 links was not uncommon. But then to realise it was only getting 1000 visitors a month lead to suspicions.
Google’s answer was to penalise these websites – they were clearly chasing links just for the sack of it. This led to the upside that if you deleted or removed a lot of links back to your website that were useless you could improve the SEO of the website. But this was incredibly laborious, and often meant contacting the site owner of the other website to ask him to remove links on a one-by-one basis.
Some link farms even had the audacity to charge for Link Removal while happily adding links for free.
On this occasion, Google was forced to come to the recuse and give Web Masters a tool to remove unwanted links and so prevent the unintentional penalising of a website. Now if you managed to find all the websites that are linked to your website you could produce a list of bad websites and upload it to Google.
The tool Google provided is called the Disavow Tool and it can be found on the Google Search Console. And like many things Google is completely free to use.
https://ahrefs.com/backlink-checker
https://app.neilpatel.com/en/seo_analyzer/backlinks
https://www.semrush.com/analytics/backlinks/