Links improve your websites google search rankings. More links simply mean higher rankings. An SEO expert will help you build useful backlinks to boost your website SEO. But it’s important to know what kind of links you need to build to achieve this.
There are a bunch lot of links to confuse you. It will be better to have an idea about each of them and an understanding of which is used when. The context is important. Link building is not easy, it’s all about manual outreach, leveraging relationships without breaking the Google guidelines.
To test the benefits and impact of the link building on website rankings, few sites were selected in an experiment conducted by Neil Patel. The selected sites had low domain score, low backlink count, no subdomains and were in English only.
The selected sites were put in 10 different groups. Each group contained 20 sites. Only 1 link tactic was leveraged by each group to measure its contribution in improving the rankings.
Here are the groups with the mention of the specific link building tactic that can be used to boost your site SEO:
After these test groups were formed and experimentation was conducted, it was time to check and evaluate the results. A summary of both is mentioned below under each group heading.
Not to forget that these links were built on the articles that were published and not on the domain homepage.
- Control – In this group, only the content was written. No link building tactic was used for this group.
The results obtained for this group clearly showed that over a period of six month’s time the content can rank for 5 times more without any link building.
- Anchor text – In this group, the links build in the article contained a keyword but the linking sites were not much relevant to the article. A total number of 3 anchor text links built per article.
Anchor text plays a major role in improving your site rankings. In this experiment, the links used were not much relevant to the article but still the results showed that the ranks were improved drastically. Though you should always use relevant anchor text links and not the spammy links.
This strategy Is very effective with backlinks containing your brand name as an anchor text to something that contains a keyword. You can ask people to switch such backlinks to boost your site rankings.
- Content-based links – Three content based links were built. These links tend to happen within the content of the article.
The results showed that three in-content links that were relevant to the article and were not anchor text rich improved the site rankings proving their effectiveness.
- Sitewide links – One sitewide link was built per article to check the effectiveness. As it’s a common belief that search engines don’t care about the sitewide links, especially those in the footer.
Sitewide links are told to be spammy if they are in the footer of a site. The results of this experiment showed an increase in ranking in comparison to the control group but these sitewide links were not much effective for page one rankings.
- Multiple links from the same site – In this experiment one site links to you for multiple times within their content.
The results clearly showed that even if the same site links multiple times to you in this experiment it was 3 times, it can help boost your site rankings.
- Sidebar links – 3 links from the sidebar of different sites were built.
The results of this test proved that sidebar links have a significant impact in improving the site rankings. In-content links are most useful, then the sidebar links are effective and lastly, sitewide links that are placed in the footer are effective.
- One link – One link was built from a very relevant site to check the effect on ranking.
When it comes to link building then more is better. Three relevant links will give you better results in comparison to just one relevant link.
- No-follow links – 3 no-follow links were built per article.
No-follow links don’t have a major impact on your site rankings. The experiment results show ranking improvement over time but it looked like Google tend to not count no-follow links and even the control group that was without any links performed better than the no-follow links group. These are the least effective links for your site.
- High authority links – one link that had a domain score higher than 70 was built.
High authority links are very impactful. Even one high authority link will perform better than 3 links from a site with low domain score.
- Built and removed links – In the articles of this group 3 links were built per article and later these links were removed after 30 days when the Google picked up the links.
The results were very interesting for this group. If your site frequently loses a lot of links then your rankings will go lower than what they previously had before the link building was done.
Conclusion
These experiments and their results clearly indicate the usefulness and effectiveness of each link building tactic.
A professional SEO company will help you achieve your site ranking goals with the effective use of specific backlinks.
Backlinks are important in improving the site rank and proper SEO makes it possible by applying the correct link building strategy that benefits your site the most.
Bhavin M, co-founder of Icecube Digital, spends much of his time creating simple but valuable content which helps ecommerce entrepreneurs to grow their online business.