When Google is presented with two websites, how do its crawlers know which one is a reputable authority on a given subject, and which one offers the visitor nothing more than spam and recycled content?
The answer to that question is quite complex (as Google can be!), but a strong influencing factor is a website’s backlink profile. Backlinks act as endorsements from other websites, signalling to search engines that your website and content is valuable and trustworthy. It’s the equivalent of having a reference when you apply for a job! In this blog post, we’ll explore what a backlink profile is, why it matters, and how you can improve yours to enhance your websites SEO performance.
What is a backlink profile?
A backlink profile is the collective composite of all the external websites from across the internet that link to your own site. It is, in essence, a web of connections whereby Google (and other search engines) determine your trustworthiness and authority by checking the trustworthiness and authority of all the sites that link to your website, as well as all the websites that link to those websites – and so on and so forth.
Taking everything into account (the quality and quantity of a site’s links), your website is then assigned a domain authority score (a metric used by Moz) out of 100, which estimates its ranking potential in relation to its link index. A site with a DA of 70 will have a far easier time ranking first for competitive keywords than a site with a DA of 15 or below. Sites with high authority rankings are those like the BBC, a known ‘authority’.
What makes a strong backlink profile?
At first glance, a website with lots of backlinks could appear quite strong, but – like with all things – it should be quality over quantity. If all of its links are from spammy-looking websites that don’t offer much in the way of valuable content then those links could be considered toxic, negatively impacting the website’s overall backlink profile.
A website with a strong backlink profile will have a high number of external links from credible sources that themselves have plenty of high-quality links too. As well as the quality and quantity of links, the diversity of sources is important too. If your links come from a variety of domains, IP addresses and geographical locations (depending on your geographic objectives), that can help with your overall score and performance.
Finally, a strong backlink profile consists of links from genuine content that provides value to readers, rather than from paid manipulated sources that offer you a link but the visitor to that website nothing in return.
An example: Wikipedia
Wikipedia is known as “The Free Encyclopedia” and provides collaboratively created entries for almost every subject under the sun. While schools, colleges and universities across the world warn their students against relying on the website for their information, data suggests that it has approximately 1.7 billion inbound links. In comparison, DIY chain store B&Q has 3.6 million, and a small-medium local business can expect less than 100.
Being a central reference point for anyone interested in finding out more about a given subject, Wikipedia’s backlink profile is not only vast, but it’s also extremely diverse, featuring links from across the world, in almost every industry. While that vastness will certainly feature plenty of toxic backlinks (which is an important consideration to monitor and remove if needed), these will often outweigh by the backlink profile of most other websites. The result is Wikipedia’s domain authority is 94, exceptionally high – allowing it to rank far higher for more competitive keywords than it would with a lower DA.
What tools can you use to measure a backlink profile?
There are several different tools that can be used to measure a website’s backlink profile. Here at Gooey Digital, we use a combination of SEMRush, Moz, Majestic and Ahrefs, allowing us to create a broad picture of a website’s backlink profile. Moz, for example, tells us at a glance what a site’s DA is, Majestic provides context and gives us a specific Trust score, SEMRush can tell us where the toxic backlinks might be holding a site back, and finally Ahrefs provides detailed insights into backlink growth, competitor analysis, and in-depth link metrics that help us fine-tune our SEO strategies for optimal performance.
Why does a strong backlink profile matter?
We’ve touched on it in the previous sections, but a site with a strong backlink profile will have a higher domain authority score than a website with a poor one. The domain authority tells us what a website’s ranking potential is – the higher the DA, the higher that website can rank for potentially tricky keywords. Neglecting to improve your backlink profile can make ranking for certain terms much more difficult.
So, if you were to sit down and spend time specifically on your backlink profile, we arrive at a very important question…
What can you do to improve your backlink profile?
Lots. Here are three suggestions that can boost your backlink profile:
Create high-quality, shareable content
The best way to get backlinks to your site is by creating top-quality content that people want to read and subsequently share with their networks (who in turn share it with their own networks). We would like you to imagine a Venn diagram: on the left side is informative blog content that responds to specific keyword enquiries, and on the right is your thought leadership pieces – looser articles that address industry-wide challenges and future innovations. Of course, it would be great to create content that ticks the shareability criteria of thought leadership pieces whilst also responding directly to a user’s keyword enquiry, but so long as you are creating a balance between the two, you will have a content strategy that contributes positively towards your domain authority score and your keyword rankings.
Engage in guest blogging for reputable sites
If you find that your content is not getting shared quite as much as you would like, you might choose to work in partnership with external sites who will offer to host an article you have created so long as it is relevant to their chosen specialism. For example, if you run a kitchen design company, you might choose to host an article about kitchen design trends on a home improvement blog. Within your article, you should place a do-follow link with relevant anchor text, thus securing a backlink from a reputable website.
Monitor and clean up your backlink profile regularly
You might think that a toxic backlink (one that comes from a site that Google deems low-quality or filled with spam) is better than no backlink at all, but you would be quite wrong. After all, as the old saying goes: one bad apple can spoil the whole barrel. It’s usually not quite that serious, but it is important to regularly undertake a site health check to highlight linking websites that might prove to be unsuitable and could be damaging your domain authority score. This process should be approached with caution, but ultimately you can remove backlinks via the Google Disavow tool in Google Search Console.
Right now, you might be spending all of your time improving on-page SEO and creating blog posts that respond to specific search queries. That is a valuable use of your time, but so too is improving your backlink profile. If you would like to know more about how the concept can impact your website’s performance or would like to entrust the exercise to experienced digital marketing specialists, speak to our team today.