To create backlinks, search engine optimization (SEO) specialists heavily invest time, effort, and creativity in adding their site’s most meaningful or well-performing webpages to:
- Social bookmarking platforms,
- Discussion forums,
- News publications,
- Social media posts,
- Micro-blogging websites,
- PDF-to-flipbook converting services,
- And infographic uploading portals.
They understand the importance of nofollow links in increasing brand awareness, monthly average users (MAU), and a healthy backlink profile. Moreover, getting a “dofollow” link is an honor. However, guest posts written by you are biased in your favor, suggesting you must nofollow links to your other sites. The SEO, content writing, and blogging community exhibits several perspectives on this topic, “Should you nofollow the links to your site during the guest post submission?”
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Backlinking Risk – Low Quality, Non-Contextual, and Spammy Links
Keeping these dynamics aside, all bloggers, content creators, SEO teams, and website owners must recognize a critical risk that can make backlinks hurt your sites’ performance on search engine results pages (SERP).
You do not want the links from sites with high spam/toxicity scores. Again, after the Penguin Updates, SEOs are divided: one prevailing idea is that search engines can differentiate between good and bad links. They will ignore the bad links, combating many negative SEO attacks. However, others believe your site gets a bad neighborhood disadvantage when competing for SERP rank improvement due to the spammy sites linking to your blog posts, service pages, user-friendly HTML sitemaps, or e-commerce product pages.
Akp51v’s Tips for Backlink Profile Building Projects
- Using several free tools for content writing and SEO auditing, check the linking domains’ Moz spam score (SS) or Semrush toxicity score (TS). Both platforms offer a free plan like the zero-cost version of Ahrefs. Therefore, if you have only one website to focus on, the free accounts at Moz, Semrush, and Ahrefs are more than enough for you to perform backlink analytics.
- Otherwise, you can use the backlink checkers at SmallSEOTools.com or WebsiteSEOChecker.com. These platforms likely leverage an SEO company’s paid application programming interfaces (API) to create practically free tools for individuals like you and me who start with no budget for enterprise or pro subscriptions on Semrush, Majestic, Ahrefs, or Moz.
- Ensure you understand whether a site owner allows guest post writers the privilege to get a dofollow link. You must also determine your independent strategy that helps decide the rel attribute for a URL/link.
Questions You Must Ask in Backlinking Assignments to Enhance Your Site’s SEO Metrics
- Should a guest post link be dofollow or nofollow?
- What should be the ratio of nofollow links to dofollow links?
- Should you disavow “potentially bad backlinks”? Semrush has an educational resource about how to disavow unwanted or spammy backlinks.
- What are the chances that Google will respect your disavow file suggestions?
- Is a site technically spammy or a false positive in backlink analyzers?
- If a backlink has a “suspected to be” or “potentially” toxic status, should you whitelist it if it is likely to be a false positive report?
- Is there sufficient text between the links on a target bookmarking site?
- What is the ratio of links-to-text and links-to-HTML on the pages that link to your site?
- Should you redirect backlinking efforts to creating shareable content if the quantity of backlinks is less significant than their quality?
For Now, We Shall Rest
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All the best for your quarterly backlinking targets.
Regards,
Akp51v (content writer, blogger, and curator)