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But there are some fundamental features of a good link that are recognized by both SEOs and Google. A good backlink must be:
- Organic
- Relevant
- From a reputable website
Organicity
In the Penguin announcement we saw earlier, there is an example of a bad link, where “hair transplant in Turkey” is obviously a paid link, even though it kind of fits the context.
(Image Source – https://loganix.com/buying-links-guide/)
Another example from Google’s link schemes is using anchor links without the proper context.
From those examples, we can state that organic links should be placed in the proper context and bring value to the user.
A great example of quality backlink usage is Wikipedia.
It utilizes anchor links inside a sentence to explain some terms, and citation links to prove the information (like in academic papers).
Relevance
The main factor for a good link is relevance: the more relevant, the more PageRank is passed from the referring domain to the destination domain.
In the Penguin announcement we saw earlier, there is an example of a bad link, where “payday loan” links were inserted into a fitness article.
It’s one layer of relevance (content to link), but there are more:
- Domain-domain
- Page-domain
- Domain-page
- Page-page
Source domain authority
The previous 2 components are pretty straightforward, yet hardly measurable. The authority is both very unclear and incalculable.
For example, let’s deconstruct why Wikipedia is an authority website.
1. High-quality content:
Wikipedia provides outstanding content regarding the topic, because of strict guidelines and community moderation. Thus, Wikipedia is considered a trustworthy source that a user can rely on when looking for some information online.
2. Great backlinks profile:
Wikipedia has over 4 billion links from more than 9 million domains. Not only quantity but also quality. The list of referring domains includes the best SEO links from sites like nytimes.com, mozilla.org, google.com, w3.org, bbc.com, and many more.
Note this list does not include links from community platforms (e.g. Reddit) since those links aren’t too valuable since anyone can get them. Perhaps the main reason why Wikipedia has so many great backlinks is its comprehensive content.
3. Social proof:
Besides content and backlinks, there are other important parameters Google uses to rank pages and sites – UX metrics.
Users love Wikipedia because it provides amazing content in a form users like while also having a thoroughly built website navigation.
Google knows the user is satisfied when they enter the search term, visit the page, and don’t go back to search results.
This pattern means that the page the user visited totally satisfies the search term.
In this way users evaluate pages, and pages that pass this evaluation are considered “good” by Google.
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