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SEO Basics 3 – Off Page SEO: Link Building
This is the third post in a series about the basics of search engine optimization. In this post, we cover links, link building, and Off Page SEO.
Nicholas Molina
January 15, 2020
Links as Key Signal
One critical HTML tag we left out of our prior post was the <a> or anchor tag. <a> tags represent links between webpages and websites. In SEO, links work like referrals, with the linking page vouching for the linked page. Like in real life, the greater the quantity and quality of the referrals, the greater trust of the referred.
The use of link popularity in search was Google’s first, and arguably greatest, contribution to internet search. Google called its link relationship algorithm PageRank. The PageRank algorithm works by assigning a PageRank score to a webpage or website based on its links — the greater the number and quality, the greater the score. Sites or pages with a high PageRank are deemed more credible. In SEO, this accumulated credibility is known as link juice or link equity.
Linking passes link juice between websites and pages. High PageRank pages like CNN have and pass lots of link juice, giving any page they link to a huge SEO boost. Low PageRank sites pass less link juice. Accumulating link juice with more and better links to your website is known as link building. Since link building involves other websites linking to your website, it is known as Off Page SEO.
Here’s a classic example of how link juice works using buckets to represent websites:
Before we explore link building any further, let’s take a look at the ‘’ tag and its attributes:
<a href=”https://banana.com” rel=”nofollow” target=”_blank”>Banana!</a>
hrefis the URL of the page being linked to.relis an optional attribute that defines the relationship between the linking page and the linked page. There are a few possible values, but the most important to focus on for now is the “nofollow” value. We’ll describe this more fully below.targetis another optional attribute that doesn’t matter for SEO but may improve the user experience, “_blank” means the link will open up in a new tab.
rel="nofollow" tells search engine bots the linking page isn’t vouching for the linked page and not to pass any link juice. In other words, nofollow links are links with no SEO rank value. Zero, nada, none. This is important for link building because, while nofollow links may bring traffic to your site, they won’t affect your SERP rank.
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Nofollow links – Links with
rel=”nofollow”that don’t pass link juice. -
Follow links – Links that pass link juice.
Link Building
Link Building is hard, largely because it’s not fully under your control. To build links back to your site, or backlinks, you’ll have to convince other websites to link to your content. There are a few ways to do this, and while link building strategies go deeper than this intro allows, here are the most common ones:
- Content – First, create a great piece of content, be it an interesting article, video, or infographic. Then promote it on social media, blogs, and other websites to convince them to share it and link back to you. This approach is kind of like public relations without a formal press release.
- Press Releases – Alternatively, you could write an actual press release and pitch it to the press. Reporters are always looking for interesting stories and, if you have something newsworthy, they might reach out for an article, interview, or offer you the opportunity to write an editorial.
- Guest Articles – Writing is hard, and websites are constantly searching for content. If you have something interesting to say, try pitching guest articles directly to blogs in your industry or websites frequented by your target market.
Blackhat Warning: Link Buying
You may come across websites offering to sell you links — don’t buy them. This is another Blackhat SEO tactic that is likely to get your site penalized. Websites offering these links are poor quality and unlikely to have any relation to your services, making the backlinks they offer spam at best. Search engines, again, who derive value from providing quality answers, don’t want to reward or recommend spam and will punish websites that try to cheat their algorithm.
A brief interlude on press releases
There used to be a link buying loophole where you could effectively buy follow links without penalty by including them in a press release. Unsurprisingly, this practice got abused, and Google ended when they announced they would penalize press release services that added follow links in their press releases. Since Google’s announcement in 2013, every reputable press release service hardcodes nofollow attributes in their links. This isn’t to say press release links aren’t valuable, they can still generate traffic, they just won’t help your website’s SERP rank.
Internal Linking
Link building is an Off Page SEO tactic, but many of the same concepts apply to your website’s internal content and linking structure. Just like CNN has more link juice than a small blog, your home page has more link juice than your product pages, and your product pages have more link juice than your blog posts. Linking your web pages together creates associations between them and helps pass or share the link juice from one page to another, helping all of your pages rank better.
What we learned
A website’s inbound links are a key signal in page relevancy and a major factor in SERP rank. Not all links are equal, links from popular websites are more valuable than links from less popular websites. The SEO value a link passes is known as link juice. A nofollow link passes no link juice. Link building is the process of creating engaging content that convinces other websites to link to you. Don’t forget to link your content internally to spread link juice around your website.
Coming Up
The next and final segment in the series talks about Technical SEO concepts like sitemaps, page speed, and structured data.