Either if you are new to link building or already an experienced user, we are sure that this article is a useful one for any of you as we are going highlight and explain some important things about link building and its’ importance and impact over website ranking and SEO overall.
As link building is important for those who are going, willing and have the capacity to compete on search engines and win a position above others. To make everything clear, we’ve split all-important headlines into small chapters.
What is link building?
Before proceeding to the process of link building, it is necessary to explain to the new ones what is link building, and where it comes from.
So, link building is a process of collecting hyperlinks (called links further) from other websites to your own. Hyperlinks are benefic for users and search engines to find the necessary information instantly on other pages that the original one. So, search engines will use links between your pages, and links between your entire website and as well as other websites for crawling.
Out of the entire specter of SEO services, it is commonly agreed that link building is one of the toughest and difficult tasks. And as SEO techniques may vary in difficulty, most SEOs spend most of the time in link building trying their best to achieve maximum results. And exactly for this reason, if you can master the high-quality link building, you can call yourself better than both other SEOs and your competitors.
The structure of a hyperlink
Now that we have cleared out the definition and general description, we can proceed to the structure itself of a hyperlink, to have a better understanding of what is it actually.
First of all, we have to see how a search engine views a hyperlink and how they do understand it:
Link tag
Also named anchor tag, the “a” is what opens the link tag and instructs search engines that what’s next to it – is a link to another page.
Link referral location
The “Href” is a short form of hyperlink general location and the text inside the quotations marks indicates the URL to which the link is leading to. However, the URL isn’t necessarily a page, it could be as well an address of an image or a file. In other circumstances, you may see something that starts with something else than a link – with a # sign. This type of link will lead you to another location on the same page you are on.
Visible text of the link
This is the tiny segment of the text that is usually highlighted and/or underlined and users click on it to find the needed information. This text is usually formulated as a logical bond between the information that it leads to and the context in which it is mentioned.
Closure of a link tag
This is the end of the link tag and reveals that the link is workable and ready to be displayed and it should be unless there is an error inside.
Search engines use links for two reasons:
- To discover new links
- To decide the link’s position as a search result
Immediately after the page was crawled by a search engine, they can be indexed and added to search results as a reliable, or not content for the specific search term. To understand more, google even created a short video about how things work.
The entire story leads to one idea – the higher the quality of websites that link to you, the better. However, to get a high-quality website for yourself and your business, it takes some time and a lot of effort and knowledge, especially after Google started updating regularly their terms and conditions regarding page ranking.
So if a while ago Google tolerated practices like listing a page in web directories and then getting back a link from it, now this doesn’t have such an impact as SEOs abused and overused this practice to rank higher and achieve their goals.
At this moment, these practices are even penalized by Google, and the entire ranking strategy became way more complicated and difficult to realize.
It is not known how the algorithm works, but one thing is for sure – links still play a huge role when it comes to page ranking on Google.
Nofollow Links – How to Use and Why
The nofollow attribute is used for links that you don’t want to give ranking empowerment. So, this works pretty simply – as a user, you will not make the difference between a dofollow and a nofollow backlink. However, if we look in the code, there is a small difference that makes the entire work.
The highlighted with brown text is what makes a link – a nofollow link, and it is used by many websites and marketers when it comes to link building or sharing links to other websites. As well, this practice is used and it is useful when trying to avoid link spammers and for this reason, the rel=”nofollow” comes at hand.
Just another reason the nofollow attribute is used is to identify and highlight the links that were not paid for advertising purposes and make the difference. So for example, if you mention a page on your website for advertising purposes and still waiting for the payment or you didn’t agree at all on the payment, it is simple to add the nofollow attribute and, thus you will not be sharing domain & link authority to other websites.
In terms of work, you should know that nofollow links will not help you at all in the ranking, as do-follow links do, but still, the first ones are not totally worthless – after all the user doesn’t make the difference between a do-follow and a no-follow link.
