One of the most impactful elements to achieving high website authority with the search engines is to understand the domains that link to your content. Sites with high scores, who are perceived as highly authoritative with search engines will help your performance. Conversely, sites that are of low quality or toxic can be harmful.
Link building s one of the most highly debated topics within the SEO space. SEO pros who date back to the early 2000’s have proven the value of links when there was no Search Engine Land or rhetoric coming directly from Google. It was proven with good old trial and error.
Back in 2020, Google’s own John Mueller stated, “Just to be clear, Google doesn’t use Domain Authority ‘at all’ when it comes to search crawling, indexing, or ranking.” However, the recent document leaks from Google prove that these comments where nothing but rhetoric as there is now proof that Google uses a metric called siteAuthority. There is a great article on the leaked Google documents at Search Engine Land.
What I know to be true from experience is that are two activities involved with analyzing the strength of your backlink portfolio – identifying and managing bad links, and building new, authoritative links to your content. With my process there is a deliverable with actionable recommendations for each.
Link Strategy
A Link Strategy will analyze the strength of our current website content in being “linkable” or strong enough to entice others to link to your page without being prompted.
Overview. Research is conducted on the website to identify the number of pages are engaging enough to be considered “linkable” to other websites. That research is combined with information is gathered in our client questionnaire to put together a strategic plan to increase the number of quality websites that link to our content.
Benefit. Taking the time necessary to review the current linkable assets and provide recommendations on new pieces that will be easier to place backlinks is a critical component. The organizations that are most successful are the ones who are willing to publish content that is of natural or timely interest to other webmasters rather than expecting overly branded or overtly promotional pieces of content.
The one thing that I do know is when backlinks stop working for my clients I will stop recommending them. Until then, these actions are still highly recommended. Get started with improving the health of your site’s backlink portfolio today.