Backlinks

What is it?

Backlinks, also referred to as “incoming links,” are links pointing at pages on your site from other websites.  Search engines often treat backlinks as ‘votes’ for a site, so the number and quality of backlinks has a significant impact on your SEO.

Why it matters

Backlinks are a huge part of any SEO strategy. Your website should aim for a competitive volume and quality of backlinks to compete for high search engine ranking.

Link building (i.e. purposely obtaining links to a website) is a large part of effective Search Engine Optimization, especially for new or poorly ranking websites.

How it works

Backlinks are counted by Ahrefs, a third party. Silktide counts the backlinks pointing to the specific subdomain that this website is hosted on, e.g., www.example.com and another.example.com would be counted separately. It is unable to distinguish between backlinks to specific pages, so if your Silktide website excludes specific pages they will not be excluded from this test.

The approach used is equivalent to Google – Ahrefs attempt to crawl every significant page on the Internet, and record all of the links they find. From this, they are able to count the number pointing to a given domain.

Potential problems

If a website is new, it can take some time to find links to it. If the website has very few incoming links, there is a chance this test will not find them.

It is not possible to count every possible link from every possible website. Like Google, this test cannot search the whole Internet instantly on demand. Instead it checks an index it has built of the majority of the Internet, which is being constantly updated. As a result, like Google, results will always be approximate.

Also, the number of links reported by different search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, etc.) will vary from this count and each other. There is no consensus on how links should be counted.

For example, Google is much pickier at counting links, but the links they do count are of higher value. Among other criteria, Google generally exclude links that:

• Come repeatedly from one website (e.g., in the footer of every page)
• Come from a set of related webservers (e.g., similar / identical IP addresses)
• Come from a set of websites which appear to reference each other exclusively
• Come from sites that reciprocate the link
• Come from blacklisted websites
• Come from brand new websites
• Come from websites filled with user-generated content (e.g., Wikipedia)
• Are invisible or nearly so (e.g., white text on white background)

In effect, Google is very good at eliminating most of the common tricks for generating artificial links, which people have used to trick search engines in the past. All link counts use some variation of this approach, and these approaches are usually kept secret.

Therefore, you should not consider this test an absolute metric, but a relative one. You can use it to say website A has more links than website B, but you shouldn’t ascribe precise value to a specific number of links. The value in this information is in how it compares with other sites, not how high the number is.

How to improve your backlinks

You should always be gaining more quality links to your website (see link building).

Once a website has reached a certain critical mass, it should usually gain respectable backlinks all by itself. At this point, your main concern will be building backlinks around specific and desirable keywords.