How do you get good backlinks? In this article you will learn everything about backlinks and link building. Backlinks are links from other websites to yours. These backlinks have always been the basis of Google’s algorithm (SEO) because they were seen as recommendations.  

When Google first came into existence, the basis of the rating system was for displaying search results

The SERP or search results page is the main page on which an internet search engine displays its results. Those pages are somewhat similarly classified by the different search engines. There are by the way based on how many backlinks a site had. Google found that if a lot of sites link to a certain website, that website must have a high value and thus it is placed high in the search results. You can buy backlinks and have the best deal now.

• Each link was seen as a ‘vote’ for your website. These votes (backlinks) together determined your ‘website popularity’ and to measure this popularity of your website Larry Page called the so-called PageRank.
• Page rank, also called Google Page Rank (GPR), is a number that Google gives your website. Pagerank is named after one of Google’s founders (Larry Page) and has historically been an important part of it.

This is sort of a 0-10 score for your website, determined only by the number and value of inbound links. Initially, Google counted the number of backlinks to your website. The more backlinks you had, the better your website scored in Google. Later on, the quality and relevance of the backlinks was considered more and less the quantity.

Link building

As mentioned, it is very important that you only apply the ‘link building’ (gathering backlinks) techniques that still work today and thus add value to your website and reputation in Google’s eyes. Below is a list with a number of link building do’s and don’ts.

Quality backlinks

What is a qualitative backlink now? For this you have to take a number of things into account:

Relevance

If the site that links to you has nothing to do with yours, Google will also find the link irrelevant and will therefore yield you very little. For example: A link from a website about entrepreneurship to a website with marketing information is relevant and therefore of added value. 

• A gardening website with a link to a marketing website is irrelevant and will therefore contribute less to you ranking
• Ranking literally means ‘to put in order’. When it comes to internet marketing we usually mean the order of search results in a search engine (SERP from Google or Bing, for example).

Building a natural link profile ensures that you will be less likely to be punished algorithmically or manually by Google by backlinking practices. A natural link profile means that links come from all kinds of different websites and refer to all kinds of different pages and articles within your website. Below you can see an example of such a natural link profile.