Backlinks
Backlinks are an important factor in search rankings, as they display trust and authority to pages on a website. However, there are a number of best practices that need to be adhered to, including ensuring links are relevant and not seen as spam. Below, we’ve compiled a list of key takeaways and SEO best practices for backlinks from Google’s regular SEO Office Hours sessions.
For more on optimizing your website’s links for search engines check out our additional resources:
5 Internal Linking Strategies to Boost SEO and Drive Organic Traffic.
Monitor and Disavow Backlinks Regularly
It’s good to monitor your new backlinks links for potentially low quality, irrelevant links, and disavow them, to avoid any risks from backlink penalties.
Links from Sites Hit by Penalties Won’t Harm You
Links from sites hit by penalties won’t harm your rankings.
Backlink Disavow Doesn’t Do Anything Until Google Updates Penguin Data
If you have a Penguin penalty for backlinks, and you remove or disavow those backlinks, you won’t see any effect until Google updates the algorithm again and refreshes the data. John says it’s a long delay and you should go as far as possible with disavow including domain level disallow directive to make sure you cover as much as you can.
Redirecting URLs Do Lose Some PageRank
Changing URLs and using redirects does result in a small loss of PageRank. Keeping original URLs is still better if possible. This is also why Google recommend updating backlinks.
Backlink Data in Search Console Is Delayed
Backlinks reported in Webmaster Tools come directly from the Googebot web crawling process, give or take a few days delay.
Verify All Domain Variations in Search Console
In Webmaster Tools, you need to verify all combinations of your domain. e.g. www/non-www, http/https in order to see all the backlinks.