Basically, a backlink is a reference from an external website to another website. Backlinks are hyperlinks es . If a website visitor clicks on the anchor text, he is forwarded directly to the respective other page. The link can also be considered as a recommendation in the field of SEO. Recommendations are a good sign for search engines. They suggest that the content of the recommended website has a high added value. Therefore, they are extremely relevant for the searcher. This is usually rewarded with an improved ranking by the search engine giants.
Strategic backlink building guides the reader and the web crawler from topic-relevant content to the desired website. For the search engine, topic relevance, backlink quantity and quality are important elements for ranking. The higher the quality of the links on the web, the more relevant the content of the website is ranked. Backlinks are distinguished between Do-Follow and No-Follow links.
A Do-Follow link is traceable for readers and for the crawler. In contrast to the No-Follow Link. This is traceable for the reader. The Google crawler is excluded from tracking by a setting in the source code. This practice is now very common in online newspapers. Otherwise, daily newspapers run a high risk of being penalized by search engine operators.
Individual backlinks do not make a significant difference for the search engines. With a higher number of backlinks, es the Google crawler has an easier time finding the recommended page. Depending on how this page is linked, a more or less advantageous PageRank is created. This defines the popularity of the backlink. The focus here is on the natural emergence of backlinks, since a high number of unnatural backlinks is often considered spam by Google & Co. In this case, website operators are punished in a Google penalty. At the latest then professional SEO advice should be taken.
A Google penalty catches most website owners unprepared. In the worst case, the website disappears from the Google index and cannot be found via organic search; an absolute worst case!
Backlinks are created in different ways. For example, it happens as a link exchange with partner websites. In a link exchange, both parties recommend each other and place the other link on their own website. Google evaluates this as natural link building. Topic relevance plays an important role. High-quality content such as whitepapers or excellently researched content provides backlinks. Here, websites with good content and a consistent inbound marketing concept are far ahead.
Unnatural link generation hides purchased backlinks - of inferior quality. Here, the search engine algorithm weights the quality of the link-giving website. Too many outgoing links to websites without relevance to the topic, dubious offers and many broken links are evaluated negatively by the search engine. The crawler mainly recognizes automatically generated links - and these can become a problem for website operators. Therefore, a look into backlink analysis tools is not a trivial matter.
A basic link building analysis and backlink monitoring are therefore essential. On the one hand, you can find a list of all backlinks in the Google Search Console or in the Bing Webmaster Tools. A regular check provides information about the quality of the links. If there are many spam links among them, either the contact with the link-giving website must be sought. If there is no reaction, the Disavow option of the GSC can be used as a last resort.