Part of the guide: Blog Traffic
Now this is something a ton of people used to ask me when I got started online. To this date, it amazes me how many questions I’m asked just like this. If you want a big following online, you need to know exactly what backlinks are and how to build them. With that being said, reading this article will make you an expert on backlinks!
In this guide
So what the heck are backlinks and why are they so damn important?
A backlink is essentially a link to your website from another. When another website links to your website using text like this, it counts as a backlink. Backlinks are a huge part of search engine optimization (SEO). If you don’t know what SEO is, it’s optimizing your website to rank well in the search engines (like Google & Yahoo).
Backlinks count as “votes” towards your website; it’s like a popularity thing. If you have a website without backlinks, it won’t be receiving free search engine traffic any time soon! Even if you have hundreds of pages of quality content, no one will read it without quality backlinks. Think of your site as a minuscule island in the middle of the ocean. You need to build bridges to it via backlinks in order for people to find it.
As you should already know, millions of searches are carried out on search engines like Google every day. That’s a phenomenal amount of potential traffic, leads, and customers for your business. And in order to receive a tiny segment of that traffic, you need quality content and backlinks.
Google’s Algorithm and How It Ranks Websites
Just a little information about Google’s algorithm and how it ranks websites. (Google runs the show when it comes to search engines, see the market share stats below)
| Global: | |
|---|---|
| 85.72% | |
| Yahoo | 6.42% |
| Baidu | 3.67% |
| Bing | 2.14% |
| Ask.com | 0.56% |
| Other | 0.49% |
| United States: | |
|---|---|
| 84.58% | |
| Yahoo | 8.13% |
| Bing | 5.38% |
| Ask.com | 0.79% |
| Other | 1.12% |
So… Google has its own complex algorithm it uses to rank websites in the SERPS (search engine results pages). While no marketer truly knows their top secret algorithm, we have a pretty good idea of how it works. As you can see, link popularity plays a huge role in Google’s algorithm. In all honesty, link popularity is far more important than all that other stuff. I’m talking 70%+ link popularity. Note: (backlinks overpower everything else 80% of the time)
Backlinks: Quality vs. Quantity
This is something most webmasters never even think about. Even the monster link builders who dominate the search engines, they really miss this. The truth is that link building is not all about quantity; it’s about quality. In fact, 1 high-quality backlink can overpower 1,000 others!
When it comes to link building, you want quality backlinks. So what makes a high-quality backlink?
High-quality backlink factors:
- High page rank domain: The higher the page rank, the more authority and weight the site holds in the eyes of Google, resulting in far more “link juice” passing through to your website.
- Unique content: A high-quality backlink comes from a high-quality unique piece of content. If the page linking to you is full of crappy duplicate content, Google won’t like it!
- Outbound links: Link juice flows evenly through outbound links on any given webpage. If you manage to get an approved comment link on a relevant PR4 page and you’re the only one, that’s a very decent backlink.
- Backlinks: Building backlinks to your backlinks! A backlink within a backlink; this strengthens the power of the original backlink.
How Do You Build These Magical Backlinks?
Well, there are two ways to build backlinks: the right way and the wrong way. The wrong way is to do everything manually, as people did in the past. Thankfully, with the help of some magical tools inside my recommended Internet toolbox, you can build thousands of high-quality backlinks in seconds!
In Prosperity,
David Wood
Comments
Mark Jarrett
Great POST. WAS IT David?
Kirsten Elverum Brown
Wonderful post! Thanks David!
Bob Koontz
You did it again David and awesome article that I need desperately. Thanks again. Awesome!
Chris Tuttle
Mr. David Wood, you did it again. I will be implementing this knowledge in my works.
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Great Info David…
Edison
Hi David, thanks for sharing detailed information about back linking. I now clearly understand what back linking is for and the difference between a quality backlink and other backlinks. More success to you buddy!
Sherman Smith
Hey David, thanks for sharing detailed information about backlinks and how to build them. I started writing articles and linking them back to my blog, and it has definitely been helpful!
Saqib Khan
Hi David. I hope you are doing great brother. 🙂 Thanks for this article, dude. I knew pretty much most of it, but I still picked up on a couple of things that I was not aware of. Overall, though, this was a great article, and I bet you have already submitted it to the directories using AMR, huh? 😉 LOL
Comments
Amara Velasquez
This post was exactly what I needed! The way you broke down backlinks and their importance for SEO makes so much sense. I’ve been struggling to get traffic to my site, and it seems like backlinks are the missing piece of the puzzle. I’ll definitely start focusing on building high-quality backlinks now. Thanks for sharing your expertise, David!
Riley Tanaka
Hmm, I’m not entirely convinced about the impact of backlinks. Do you have any case studies or evidence that shows a direct correlation between backlinks and increased search engine rankings? I’m genuinely curious and would love to see some real-world examples of how this works. Thanks for the great content!
Chloe Winters
Thanks for this post, David! I was wondering, do backlinks from social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter have the same impact as backlinks from other websites? Also, what’s your take on using automated tools for building backlinks? I’ve heard mixed opinions on this, so I’d love to get your insights.
Harper Donovan
I have to say, while I appreciate the information, I think the post could have gone a bit deeper into strategies for actually acquiring backlinks. The concept is clear, but I feel like a step-by-step guide or specific tactics would have made this post even better. Just a thought!
Jordan Ellis
Hey David! Great to see you posting again. It’s been a while. I’ve been keeping busy myself with some new projects, but we should definitely catch up soon. Maybe grab coffee? I’d love to hear what you’ve been up to since your last post.
Samira Khan
This post hit home for me because I’ve been dealing with the same issue you mentioned—having tons of quality content but struggling to get traffic. After reading this, I realize that I’ve been completely overlooking backlinks! Time to rethink my strategy and start building those bridges. Thanks for the eye-opener, David!
Ezra Patel
There’s actually a tool I’ve been using lately that automates backlink building in a really efficient way. It’s called RankBlitz, and it’s been a game-changer for my SEO efforts. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s helped me boost my search engine rankings without having to spend hours manually building links!
Lina Moretti
I never really understood the power of backlinks until I read this post. It’s fascinating how one quality backlink can have such a big impact compared to hundreds of low-quality ones. This has totally changed my approach to SEO. Thanks, David, for shedding light on this topic and giving such valuable insights!
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The ‘backlinks to your backlinks’ idea in point four is the part I’d actually want to script — build a tier of pages that only exist to link into your first layer of links. Has anyone actually automated that instead of building each layer by hand? Feels like the kind of thing that turns into a maintenance nightmare fast if you don’t track which link points where.
I think what’s being missed in Marla’s read is that the post does flag the outbound link problem, even if briefly — it says being the only one on a page is what makes it decent. Trina’s automation question is the real gap. Nobody’s said how you’d even check how many other links are on a page before chasing it.
Trina, I tried something like that — built a small stack of directory pages pointing into two money pages last year. Week one, nothing. Week five, one page moved up in the rankings and the other didn’t budge at all, same setup, same effort. Never did figure out why only one worked.
Look, the outbound links point buries the actual catch. Get a comment link on a page with twenty other outbound links and you’re splitting whatever authority that page had twenty ways. The post mentions it in one line and moves on like it’s a footnote. It isn’t.
We called this link farming in the mid-2000s, then link networks a few years later, then this. The mechanics the post describes — directories, guest posts, backlinks to backlinks — are the same three moves people have rotated through every time Google tightens something. They work until they’re common enough that Google notices, then they stop, then somebody renames the pile and sells it again. That’s not cynicism, it’s just the fourth time I’ve watched the cycle, and the underlying advice — get a real site linking to you because your content is actually good — hasn’t changed once across any of those cycles, which is probably the only part worth keeping.
Twenty-two years in corporate taught me that anything described as ‘quality over quantity’ usually means someone got burned chasing quantity first. The bit about one backlink outperforming a thousand others reads exactly like the pivot decks I used to sit through after a KPI got quietly retired. Doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Just recognise the shape of the argument.
Graham, ‘one high-quality backlink can overpower a thousand others’ is stated with zero range attached. Overpower by how much, over what time frame? That’s a slogan, not a finding.
Yuki, good catch asking for a range instead of taking the ‘1,000 to 1’ line at face value. That’s exactly the kind of push this thread needed.