Quality Backlinks

If you’ve heard that you need quality backlinks to your website for higher search engine rankings you have probably started to ask yourself these 2 questions

1. What makes a backlink a high quality backlink?
2. Where do you find high quality backlinks?

High Quality Backlinks – Definition

If you look in the Websters dictionary for the definition of high quality backlinks you are not going to find it.  In fact, you aren’t going to find the term backlinks either.  So that brings me to the answer of the first question.  When does a backlink go from being just a backlink, to becoming a quality backlink?

Quality Backlinks Criteria

Well first of all this is a list of everything that I deem makes a backlink a quality backlink.  Some people may disagree on some of these points and I don’t really care because I bet I could outrank them on any search term if it came down to a contest.  These points aren’t from some unproven theory I have concocted, this comes down from testing millions of different types of backlinks to hundreds of sites.  I then take the data and analyze it like no one ever has.  My data has given me these conclusions on what makes a high quality backlink.  I’ll start with the very basics and then I’ll move to more advanced factors that you can implement.

1) Quality backlinks come from domains with page rank – the higher the better

Now notice that I wrote they should come from domains with high pagerank, not necessarily a page itself with PR.  I rather get 5 contextual backlinks from 5 PR9 domains rather than 5 backlinks from a couple of PR2 pages on PR2 domains.  I’ll explain more on that later but to see the power of this you can read about this profile link wheel that put a client to #3 in the search engines just by giving them 5 direct backlinks from PR9 domains.  Trust me, I have proof of concept from actual proof of rankings.

2) Contextual Backlinks are much higher quality

Next on the list talk about the difference between a plain old backlink and a contextual backlink.  Here is the difference.  A contextual backlink is the HTML anchor text surrounded by other words and text.  I have found the profile links can still be very powerful as long as you are surrounding them with relevant text, and then of course forcing the indexation by building links to your links – yes, it is absolutely tiresome but a quick way to build links to links and force the indexation is with Backlink Energizer.

As if it wasn’t enough just to build backlinks, now you’re being told to build backlinks to those backlinks.  Sounds like some kind of pyramid scam concocted by SEO professionals and link builders to sell even more links, but its unfortunately true and I don’t have time to explain all the reasons on why it works in this post.

When you are posting a link on a website make sure you put relevant text around your backlink.  Look for some of the related text that someone may find on a search for that keyword.  Google knows with its indexing algorithm that a link about a particular topic should have certain words related to that topic somewhere in the body of that text.  The algorithm is quite complex when it comes to link valuations so keep that in mind when you are burying your links into articles that are unrelated.  If you do place links into PLR articles on a topic unrelated to your link just make sure to write a sentence that makes sense and includes some of that relevant content.  Trust me, you won’t have to build nearly as many links when you build links from related content.

3) Link to Text Ratio effects the quality of a backlink

It’s important to have plenty of real quality content going along with each link to give it a higher valuation in the search engine algorithm.  I like to go with a ratio of about 1 link for every 150 to 200 words.  So if I’m submitting a short article of only 200 words I’ll usually only put 1 link in it.  If I want to place a couple of links I usually go with a 400 to 500 word article and always place them in the body of the article when possible, like in blogs.  Many article directories require it in the resource box at the bottom but realize these are getting a lower link valuation.  This is why I have found time and time again that blog networks and free blogging sites are superior for creating quality backlinks.

4) Quality Links Are in Content (not in footers and sidebars – AKA “the gutters”)

Do blogroll links help search engine rankings?  Yes they do but not nearly like they used to even just a year ago.  Links within the footers and sidebars are valued differently by the Google algorithm.  A link on homepage within the context of an article will give you much more value than a blogroll link.

Don’t be fooled by these guys selling homepage links though that try to say it’s ok for them to put 100 links in the homepage article.  If your link is one of the first ones in the article you will get a good amount of the value but if your link is all the way down the page as one of the last backlinks you won’t get much out of it.  There are so many things wrong with how homepage links are being marketed that it makes me mad.  I just wrote in item #3 that link to text ratio is important.  A page with 100 links on it will have very low valued links opposed to a page with only 1 or 2 links.

The only reason I mentioned homepage links is because that is what some people selling links did as an answer to replace blogroll links when those were devalued.  If you can get a homepage link where there are only a couple of links then that will be a very high quality backlink.

5) Quality BackLinks Come from a Page of Relevance

Google has an entire algorithm to score a page for the onsite SEO and I have determined that this algorithm is very similar when scoring a backlink.  If Google is scoring a page to rank very high for a particular keyword, doesn’t it make sense that a backlink about that keyword would have a higher value than coming from an unrelated page?  Yes it does.  I know some would argue this point with the ever stupid comment “a link is a link”, but I decided to not be ever stupid and tested backlinks from pages of relevance.

Whenever a backlink was coming from a page where the keyword was in the title of the post, in the URL of the page, and mentioned in the article it was very apparent that these backlinks received much more value.  This is a value that you cannot score by just looking at page rank, this is a value that Google creates that does take page rank into consideration but is also easily able to tell that the page itself has to do with that backlink.

Google doesn’t want you to spam the internet with thousands of articles about “dog training” while you insert your backlink about “make money online”.  It happens everyday because people don’t write content and they use PLR articles on whatever topic they can get their hands on and just throw their link in there.  Spend the extra time writing quality articles to submit to quality sites and you will end up with something I like to call quality backlinks.

Where do you find High Quality Backlinks?

There are many places to post a good article to give yourself a nice contextual backlink on a domain that has page rank and trust established.  I’ll be putting together an entire list in my Part II on where to get quality backlinks.

Quality Backlinks from .EDU and .GOV websites

For now I am giving away a free list of super high quality backlinks that come from .edu and .gov websites.  Click on the Google +1 or Tweet button to reveal these high page rank high quality backlinks in the box below.