Why You Should Actively Monitor Backlinks
Management Summary
Will backlinks become less important in the future?
The topic of backlinks and their importance in search engines has been hotly debated in the SEO community for years. Some believe that the active building of backlinks is gradually dying out, while others say it cannot be done and will never work without it. Now what’s true?
Exactly a year ago, Mat Cutts released a video in which he addressed the following question: “Are backlinks losing importance as a ranking factor?”
His answer: “Google is getting better at understanding natural languages. The user’s intention is no longer just evaluated based on individual keywords, but rather an attempt is made to understand the meaning of the text or sentence as a whole. Backlinks will become somewhat less important over time, but remain an important factor”.
He does not reveal what exactly is meant by “losing something of importance”.
In another video, Mat Cutts responded to the question:”Is there a version of Google that doesn’t consider backlinks as a relevance signal?”
His information: “Not public, but we tried it internally – and the quality of the search results was much worse!”
Since Google’s declared goal is to always provide users with the best possible search results, backlinks will remain an important ranking factor in the future.
Conclusion: without backlinks it is (almost) not possible.
Of course, there are many counter-examples where websites achieve very good rankings even without backlinks. However, this only works in niche markets where competition is low. If you want to achieve or maintain stable rankings in a competitive area, you should not only take care of various on-site factors such as content and usability, but also ensure that the website continually generates links. It will probably stay that way for several years to come!
What is Link Risk Management anyway?
Link ≠ linkSince the rollout of Penguin 2.0, it is not advisable to obtain links from web directories or affiliate programs. Google has become very good at detecting unnatural and, above all, links without added value. If so-called “low quality links” are built up excessively, sooner or later there will be a penalty due to “unnatural incoming links”; in the worst case, the page will be completely de-indexed.
Even links from large or trustworthy websites do not make them “natural”, at most you have a little more leeway due to the high level of trustworthiness. As always, it’s all about the “surroundings”: the context, the position of the link, anchor text, traffic and much more. So it’s not easy to determine whether a link on this page, with this position, and this anchor text helps or is classified as spam.
Link risk management is essentially about:
- analyze the existing profile
- Compare your own site with the competition
- Recognize link potential
- reactivate dead links
- to clean up toxic links
- monitor link growth
When is link risk management particularly important and why?
Change in URL structure
Over time there are always changes to a website, so that the URL structure changes due to a relaunch, for example. Ideally, all URLs are 301 redirected to an appropriate destination. In practice, however, this often proves to be difficult for large websites because there are countless of them. Very few people think about intercepting URLs that contain backlinks. Links that point to a 404 page are wasted link juice. Link risk management detects such “dead links” and can therefore be reactivated.
Avoid negative SEO
Just as it is possible to positively influence the ranking with high-quality links, building low-quality links can also send bad signals to Google. The chance of a negative SEO attack increases, especially in highly competitive areas. Although Google has measures to counteract this, you cannot rely on it – especially if the negative SEO is planned in a more sophisticated and unobtrusive manner, with the aim of slowly “shooting down” a page over a longer period of time. By monitoring the backlinks to your own site, such attacks can be detected and stopped.
Secure your top ranking in the search engines!
While most SEO strategies have so far been about generating rankings, investments are gradually being made in the sustainability of websites that are already established in search engines. And with good reason! For many companies, organic searches are the main source of traffic. A drop in the ranking would have a major impact on the traffic on your own site – this should be avoided. Generating and actively monitoring backlinks is and remains an important factor in ensuring a good ranking in the search engines.
