Google employs a number of techniques to improve search quality including page rank, anchor text, and proximity information. Google says that anchor text influences rankings in their original patent. Recommended reading: What Is a Nofollow Link? Everything You Need to Know Anchor textĪnchor text refers to the clickable words that form a backlink. Just don’t kick up a fuss if you get a nofollowed link. Nofollowed backlinks don’t usually influence the linked page’s rankings-although they can.īecause link building takes time and effort, it’s best to prioritize getting followed links. If your link will likely end up in the site’s footer, or along with fifty other sites in the sidebar, then put your energy into other opportunities. Placementīecause people are more likely to click prominently-placed links, some links on web pages likely pass more authority than others.īill Slawski talks about this in his analysis of Google’s updated “reasonable surfer” patent.Ĭonsider this when pursuing links. However, the sheer number of backlinks from unique websites (referring domains) and page-level authority look to be more important. Long story short, there’s a small but clear correlation between rankings and backlinks from pages with organic search traffic. We took the top-ranking pages for 44,589 non-branded keywords and looked at organic traffic to the pages that link to them. This is a question we recently tried to answer. The real question is whether backlinks from high-traffic pages positively affect rankings more than those from low-traffic pages? A Simple SEO Strategy for 2019 (The ‘Middleman’ Method)īacklinks from high-traffic pages will usually send you more referral traffic than those from low-traffic pages.Internal Links for SEO: An Actionable Guide.Here are some of the many attributes that contribute to a backlink’s quality and utility. When someone clicks on a link to your website, you get referral traffic. Referral trafficīacklinks exist to point people to useful resources. Search engines find new content by revisiting pages they already know about to check for new links.īecause search engines revisit popular pages more often than unpopular ones, they may discover your content faster if you get backlinks from popular pages. How do we know? We’ve studied link-based ranking factors on a few occasions and always find the same thing: the number of backlinks from unique websites (referring domains) correlates strongly with organic search traffic. Generally speaking, the more votes your web pages have, the more likely they are to rank for relevant search queries. Search engines like Google see backlinks as votes of confidence.

How to get backlinks