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Backlinks

Is there a competition that has fewer resources than you yet is outranking you in search results? This article will explain why and how you may get such high ranks.

Deepinder from Toronto sent in this week's Ask An SEO questions: "1. I have worked on many projects. A site with a thousand backlinks may outrank one with a hundred thousand. That identical website with a thousand backlinks was bested by one that copied and pasted information from other websites without giving credit to the original authors.
When it comes to search engine rankings, how significant are backlinks?
2. Is it considered spam if one website has 1,000 to 3,000 backlinks? Because I've seen some very great businesses doing it.
Specifically, I'd want to address your second question first.

Is it spam if I get thousands of links from one site?

The question of whether or not something is spam depends on the context.
The primary element is whether or not the links are perceived as natural as opposed to sponsored or as an intentional effort to obtain backlinks.
Examples of linkages that occur naturally are:
Companies that allow customers to easily navigate between their many brands by including links to those brands in their footers and primary navigation.
If you are an expert and a blogger includes a list of resources and additional reading in their sidebar, you should check it out.
You're generating a lot of content when you're uploading plenty of pictures to a website and seeing your work in various postings.
Each time you accomplish something noteworthy and get mentioned, sourced, or featured in the media.
Unnatural:
Giving other sites the ability to offer your items via databases and feeds.
Instructing content creators like bloggers or publishers to make a shop without the "sponsored" or "no follow" tags on their links.
Banner advertisements are sponsored placements that may appear anywhere on a website, in any category, etc.
Link-rich widgets feed and badges based on certain keywords.
Commonplace marketing tools like widgets feeds, and badges need to provide meaningful value to the user's experience.
Whether the links were purchased or earned, they will not help if the site is part of a PBN.
Via financial aid and other deceptive methods.
Participating in online discussion via blogs, forums, or other community platforms.
Use targeted keywords to connect to external category pages or items you do not produce.
Things that could be more obviously merited.
That's to name a few examples.
Yes and no, then.
In other instances, they could not be considered spam at all.
Whether or if the connections are natural and what kind of relationship you have with the website are all factors.
Let's get started with the first inquiry.

Do Search Engines Value Backlinks?

In a resounding yes, backlinks are crucial to search engine optimization. To be sure, this has nothing to do with sheer probability.
Despite having few connections, I have one customer ranking above major companies.
Regarding the trademark words used by their industry's regulating organization, they even rank higher.
Although the quality of the connections they gathered was helpful, they had already begun rating based on factors such as site structure, quality content, website appearance, and site structure before we obtained our first links.
Stranger yet, they've acquired a backlink from that government agency thanks to the article we produced for them. (This is a huge triumph!)
SEO Tools: Semrush vs. Everybody Else
In this test, we compared Semrush to another popular SEO tool. In the end, Semrush was victorious. Additional search terms, inbound connections, and practical applications are always welcome. Just who was Semrush's competitor?
One indicator that search engines utilize is backlinks.
Every aspect of a search engine is designed to provide the most relevant result to the user as quickly and easily as feasible.
That may be a movie, some pictures, a list of text, or anything else. This is even more crucial than backlinks.

Explanation of the Ranking Advantage of a Site with Fewer Backlinks

Examining what a link is may shed light on why a site with fewer links would outrank a site with a ton and how to get your website with a few links to outrank one with a few hundred thousand.
The search engines required a mechanism to identify the trustworthiness of a website and a particular page inside a website long before smartphones, schema, and notions like E-A-T existed.
One of these credibility indicators was backlinks, and in Google's case, PageRank.
With the demise of PageRank (at least in its former form), we may look to alternative methods for boosting a site's credibility and authority.
With these trust and authority signals in place, your website and this page, in particular, may now be able to compete with websites and pages that have more connections.
Having information created or approved by qualified experts in the field is an easy way to establish credibility.
Being the company's chief executive officer (CEO) only sometimes provides legitimacy or experience. That's a tough thing to accept for any CEO.

Promoting your brand is a no-brainer when another site links to your material.
However, backlinks can also boost your site's credibility with search engines.

Search engine algorithms take into consideration the number of links from authoritative sites to your content.
In other words, the more reputable websites link back to yours, the better your search engine results may rise.

Referral traffic can be extremely useful for your blog, but it is also the most difficult to acquire.

This is why:

When someone links to a post from the HubSpot Blog, it usually means they enjoyed reading it and want other people to read it too, so they put the post's URL on their own site.
The next step is for people to discover and click this shared Link, which will generate referral traffic.

In other words, someone at a website or online publication needs to come across our work and think it's interesting, informative, or useful enough to share with their readers.

For this reason, I've collaborated closely with Irina Nica, HubSpot's Sr. Marketing Manager of Product Awareness and resident backlink expert, to craft a strategy for attracting links to the blog.

Nica and I have found that the traffic gains are well worth the time and work required to generate content that attract excellent backlinks.

These are the top three categories of blog articles in terms of backlinks, authority in search engines, and non-organic traffic to aid you with your own blogging efforts.

Use Original Data To Back Up Your Stories "The blog posts that typically get the most backlinks are backed by original research and data," says Nica.
"If these blog post angles speak to wide audiences, they can even increase the chance of press mentions.
" Why?
Decisions can be made, ideas for content may be sparked, and knowledge can be gained when people have access to data.
When you put out new information, it's not unreasonable to assume that other websites will want to reference it or link to it themselves.

But, Nica argues that backlinks for a post will be even better if you write a narrative about how those statistics effect your readers, rather than merely throwing a handful of unique numbers into the body of a blog article and hitting "publish."

It's important to make a captivating tale with the information you give, as Nica puts it.
"Stories make data appealing and memorable.
A good story is often one that’s related to recent events that made the headlines, or provides context on an issue that affects a wide range of readers in your industry."

How COVID-19 Is Impacting Sales and Marketing Success is a data-driven article we just released," adds Nica.
"Because it’s timely and it provides useful information for marketers and business owners around the world, this article earned more than 500 backlinks from over 200 referring domains," Nica explains.

Include links and metadata to attribute material to its creator and other referenced sources.
Use a reliable system of internal links to direct readers to more information on the various topics or tools you've discussed in your writing.
Take precautions to ensure the safety of your website.
Improve readability by providing a clearer description of the topic or a more streamlined purchase method.
There's much more you can do:
Ensure maximum ADA compliance (the more people can access your content, the better the experience for everyone giving search engines a reason to show your page over another).
Have very quick load speeds to accommodate users on mobile devices and those with sluggish Internet connections.
Use header tags to organize your material properly.
Titles that make sense.
Images with descriptive filenames; parts properly formatted as tables, lists, paragraphs, etc.
You're missing a correct schema to specify the page's contents, so add it now.
Make sure your site is structured correctly and that your most key pages are being naturally referred to.
Google and other search engines are ramping up their efforts, and part of this new strategy is to consider the cumulative layout change across websites (CLS).
While it's true that quality backlinks will help you rank more readily than merit alone, there are steps you can do even before you start gaining links to ensure that you can outrank a page or website with tens of thousands more connections.

Ask an SEO is a weekly piece in the Search Engine Journal authored by a select group of SEO professionals chosen by the editors for their knowledge and experience in the field. Do you want to know more about search engine optimization (SEO)? To contact us, please fill out the form below. The next #AskSEO article might include the response to your question!