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7 Factors Google Uses To Evaluate Links for SEO |
Inbound links are one of the most powerful tools in the
area of online marketing. Every link pointing to your website gives authority to
your site, which makes it more authoritative and trustworthy in Google’s eyes.
The higher your website attain authority, the higher it’s going to rank in the
searches, which ultimately means more traffic and brand visibility.
Thankfully, Google has shields in place to make sure that all links aren’t
treated equally; that’s a good thing because it means you can’t spam links
across the web to manage rankings without getting a Google penalty. Most of us
can judge quickly whether a link is “natural” or whether it’s spam, but Google’s
evaluation process is more nuanced than this. So how, exactly, does Google
figure out links in its ranking algorithm? There are seven main factors:
1. Source Authority:-
As a normal rule, the more reliable the linking source domain is, the more power
the link is going to pass to the site it links to. For example, if a newly
created site doesn’t have a good amount of readers and doesn’t have many links
on its own, it’s going to be a low-authority site; any link you get from this
site will have a marginal benefit at best.
But if you can get a link from an old, well-known online publication, such as
The Huffington Post, you’ll get way more benefit from the link. Obviously, the
more accurate the link, the harder it is to acquire, so you’ll need to make a
balance of efforts between those which are most rewarding and those that are
actually available to you.
2. Nofollow:-
There is a specific omission to the authority rule: the nofollow tag. Google
allows you to tag certain links in the HTML code with “rel=nofollow” to indicate
that they shouldn’t be followed or used as a medium of passing authority.
This is mostly taken into work by the publishers to make sure that their
authority isn’t damaged by outbound links that lead to unreliable sources; after
all, links are something of a two-way street. You can also mark your own links
with a nofollow tag if you want the link to stay without passing power to other
pages.
It’s commonly reflected that if a link is marked with a nofollow tag, Google
will ignore it. However, various studies have suggested that nofollow links
aren’t always ignored by Google and that having enough nofollow links may
actually be crucial for good SEO.
3. Source Relevance:-
There’s also proof to suggest that the importance of your linking origin also
matters in Google’s estimate. If you’re posting on a blog about making great
pizza, and you link to a criminal defence lawyer’s page, then there’d better be
a wise reason for it. If you’re linking to a site about how to make the best
ingredients for your restaurant, it makes more sense.
Publishers that publish articles on a huge variety of topics often have category
pages that divide these topics, and in these kinds of cases, it’s important that
the link stays on a page within the right topical range. The rule of thumb here
is to ensure that the link makes a logical sense for your readers.
4. Contextual Relevance:-
The content that surrounds your link is also crucial. Text before and after a
link serves as contingent applicability for the destination page of the link,
catering Google to determine how the link describes the content in which it’s
placed. This effect is most noticeable in the sentence in which the link
resides, followed by the paragraph in which it stays, which is followed by the
body of the entire article in which it resides.
5. Anchor Text:-
The anchor text of your link is expected as well; this is the clickable text in
which your link is “stored.” Several years ago, before the launching of Google’s
Penguin algorithm, it was advised best practice to use anchor text showing the
exact keyword for which you expected the linked page to rank in search results.
These days, anchor text still plays a vital role in the conclusive relevance of
the linked page but is also the most feasible signal for Google to use to detect
handling, which can put anyone at risk that is using keyword-rich anchor text
excessively.
Nowadays, it’s not much important to use keyword-rich anchor text and more
important to make sure that the link anchor text is natural and journalistic.
Despite relying on anchor text to generate relevance of your linked page, rely
on contextual and source relevance.
6. Link Destination:-
When calculating links, Google will also look at the destination page—the page
through which the link points. It should be a capable part of the content that
adds up value for readers coming from the source article.
Google will analyze the title and body of the destination piece, and guide its
need based on its relevance and other quality-indicating factors. Links pass
power to both your overall domain and the individual pages you’re targeting to,
so funnelling links to one or two core pages can make those pages rank higher
than your other content ultimately.
7. Diversity:-
Finally, Google will measure the assortment of your inbound link profile. It’s
well-cited that a major factor Google looks for is domain diversity, which is
the number of unique and distinguished domains from which your website has
inbound links. For this reason, it’s more worthy, to attain links from five
different publishers than it is to attain five links from one publisher.
Achieving multiple links to the same destination page helps to achieve its page
authority, and is necessary if you’re trying to boost a particular page on your
website in the rankings, but doing so too often can make your links looks
non-natural and manipulated. That is why, when it comes to building a link,
assortment of every aspect – anchor text, linking source, destination URL, etc.
– is very crucial.
Think Beyond Google:-
I want to mention that while the majority of this article has considered links
in the context of what they can do for your rankings in Google search, that’s
only one of the small parts of their overall value. Generating links, especially
on big publications, also has the caliber to send your website referral
traffic—in other words, people who confront your link and click it to read your
content.
Your link generating strategy should be in a balance of looking natural in
Google’s eyes, creating a network of referral traffic to enjoy, and doing what’s
best for your readers and users. It’s a balance you’ll have to goal carefully,
but the results are worth it.
TAGS:
SEO,
inbound links,
SEO tool,
online marketing,
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