What Constitutes Good Backlinks?

February 8, 2008

Many webmasters/ SEO “experts” out there ask this question. In reality what constitutes Good Links or Backlinks? There are many opinions and conclusions from search engine optimization experts. Some people thinks that No backlink is “bad” in a way, there is a certain truth. I will prefer to say that all backlinks are “Good” but there are levels of good backlinks.

If you sit down and think, if there are “bad” backlinks competitors can ruin your online business making a lot of spam sites and linking to your site to drop it from your keyword ranking. So, Google mainly have a system to prevent this and make it like a “Point system” some backlinks gives you for example: 0.1 and some 0.9. Depends on how natural is your backlink, from which site (Authority) you are getting backlinks, etc..

Here are some webmaster’s / SEO Experts opinions about this issue:

IMO there is no such thing as a ‘bad’ link… therefore, one might infer that all links are ‘good’… but there are varying degrees of ‘good’.

Unless there is obvious and overwhelming evidence that you are buying links, I’m not sure the SEs can really penalize your site directly. But they can go after those selling links, which indirectly hurts you as a buyer because you may now not get what you paid for… and may continue to pay for the links not knowing that you are being passed Zero link equity from them.

The best links IMO are from authoritative, high PR sites that are relevent to your site, from pages on that source site where they are targeting similar or same keywords as the page to which they are linking on your site, and having the link in the actual text of the source site’s page, and the link text for the hyperlink being the keywords you’re targeting on the page on your site to which they are linking.

But even a ‘click here’ link on another site to a page on your site can only help (pass 0 or more link equity), never hurt…

If you’re buying links, know where they are coming from… what types of sites they are coming from… get references. And make sure that the growth looks natural.

I just wanted to add that I think it’s enough for the link to be authoritative. What you should look for when a site links to you is if your rankings change or if traffic increases, nothing else matters. Relying on the Toolbar for making decisions, as well as obsessing on how high your PR is, can cause you to overlook good links.

Must say I prefer the term “trusted” to “authoritative” as the latter implies a certain size/popularity which for most SEOs simply translates to high PR.

I look for link “justification” along the lines he mentioned and check the SERPs for their navigational keywords, if their internal links pass value there’s a good chance their OBLs will too…

I agree that no links are bad. However I find that good links are links that are on sites that relate to your topic. Think of it like this, If you place a link on a site is that person likely to visit your site from their site because of it? If the answer is yes then put it on their. I personally notice MORE people coming to my sites because of links on other peoples sites then from Google. In the long run links like this will lead not only to higher placement in Google but more traffic (because you will get the combined effects of the linking site and Google).

You want to look for a link on a page that has plenty of inbound links pointing to it. Ideally a lot of these links are from topically related sites. Another thing to look for is a page with few other links on it, so that each link carries more weight. If a page has 1000 links on it, your link will get 1/1000th of the pages passable link equity, whereas if there are only 10 links, you’ll get 1/10th.

A good link is a natural link - your link embedded in relevant content of another site pointing your site. The linking page should be cached and regularly spidered. Don’t worry about PR.