What Are Backlinks? Here’s A Basic Explanation
If you’re new to Internet marketing, you may have seen the word “backlink” and thought to yourself, “Wait, what are backlinks?”.
Backlinks, which are also often called inbound links, are basically the URL of your website that has been placed on other (usually relevant) websites by the website owner or the blog author. There are several different types of backlinks, although the 2 primary types of backlinks are no-follow backlinks and do-follow backlinks.
What Are Backlinks: No-Follow?
No-follow backlinks do not have any SEO benefits, although it is possible for them to indirectly affect your rankings when they are posted on relevant high traffic websites. No-follow backlinks can also indirectly affect your rankings by increasing the prevalence of your URL on the Internet, thus providing your URL the chance to be discovered by a webmaster who appreciated your content enough to link it on their website with a do-follow backlinks. Speaking of do-follow backlinks…
What Are Backlinks: Do-Follow?
Unlike no-follow backlinks, do-follow backlinks provide your website with direct SEO benefits, although not all do-follow backlinks are created equally. In the not too distant past, many Internet marketrs and webmasters relied on a website’s PageRank to determine whether or not a backlink from a website was worth it, although Google hasn’t publicly updated PageRank in over a year.
These days, Internet marketers rely on a variety of metrics that estimate a website’s value. Some of these metrics include: Trust Flow, Citation Flow, Domain Authority, MozRank, and Page Authority. While these metrics are not perfect (in fact, many of them are far from it) and only serve to estimate a site’s chance to rank, they are often accurate enough for us to determine a website’s value.
So, now you know what backlinks are and you no longer have to ask yourself, “what are backlinks”.If you would like to learn more about the other types of backlinks, view the articles in my “related articles” section.
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