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How to Get Backlinks

Due to the importance of having a strong backlink portfolio, it is imperative to understand how to get backlinks. While backlinks are not nearly as important to search engine algorithms as they once were, a strong backlink portfolio can still benefit your website substantially. Domain and page authorities are dependent on backlinks, and these play a key role in how your website performs in search results.

As you learn how to acquire backlinks and begin implementing the strategies to be covered below, you’ll want to track the results from such. While you’ll need a tool to monitor your backlinks specifically, you can rely on StatCounter to ensure the rest of your SEO strategies are paying off. Before you sign up for StatCounter, or upgrade to our Growth Plan, let us explain how to get backlinks to your site.

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How to Get Backlinks for Your Website

While important to your website’s strength, quality backlinks can be difficult to obtain, or at least a tedious task to carry out. Of course, there are severals ways to build your website’s backlink portfolio and you will want to utilize each of these avenues in order to build a sufficient backlink portfolio. Now, let’s take a look at some key practices in acquiring backlinks for your website.

Submitting to Online Directories

One way to get backlinks is to submit your website and business to local, online directories, but there’s plenty of directories that aren’t specific to local businesses as well. Directories like Yelp!, FourSquare, and Yellow Pages will give your website a backlink and allow for another avenue for search users to find your website. While these directories likely give you a nofollow backlink rather than a follow link, they can still be beneficial.

Essential Definition

A nofollow backlink doesn't contribute or have an effect on your ability to rank in search engines.
On the other hand, follow backlinks do pass over site strength, and they can help you rank in search results. Guest blogging, which we’ll cover below, are considered follow backlinks.

As you submit your website to directories like those mentioned above, you must ensure the information in each directory matches that on your website. This includes your business’s name, address and phone number (NAP), as well as your business hours (if applicable).

Commenting in Blogs, Forums, etc.

Another way to get backlinks is to comment on authoritative blogs and forums related to your industry. Be sure to make your comment relevant and insightful, as this can help avoid having your comment removed. Much like online directories, these backlinks are often times nofollow links, but they are still valuable. If another user reads that blog post and sees your comment below and finds it interesting, they are more likely to click through to your site.

Additionally, some blogs and forums will allow you to use anchor text in your comments, which provides you the opportunity to associate your link with a keyword. Regardless, be careful in commenting on blogs and forums, as commenting on an irrelevant post may seem spammy and result in your comment being removed (as we’ve mentioned above). In short, only comment if the post relates directly to the link you’d like to leave and be sure to provide insight or something worthwhile in your comment for other commenters.

Guest Blogging: The Ultimate Backlink Strategy

Arguably the best way to build high-quality backlinks is to guest blog for other websites in your industry. This requires a bit of research to discover which authoritative sites allow guest blogging, and the guidelines for such on their site. This can also open up a relationship between your business and other businesses within your industry, which can obviously be beneficial. In writing guest posts, you’ll need to leave a link in the content directing users to your website. Again, you can use anchor text here to include a relevant keyword. This tells search engines what the linked-to page is about, which can help improve search results rankings.

Pro Tips

While the strategies above can help you acquire backlinks for your website, you should always focus on content that will acquire backlinks itself. For instance, if you write a great article on a specific topic, others will feel more inclined to link to your page, as it’ll provide valuable information to other web users. In accomplishing such, be in depth in your writing and offer insight to your readers.

How to Disavow Backlinks

Of course, not every backlink directed to your website is beneficial. Spammy websites often link to other websites to make users believe they are authoritative, when in fact, they are not. Link farms, for example, are a black hat SEO practice that many website owners continue to take part in because they believe these links will benefit their website. This, however, is not the case.

Spammy backlinks are disastrous for a website’s search result rankings, as these can get a website penalized, or even blacklisted, from search engines. If this occurs, your website will have a difficult time ranking for low volume keywords, let alone highly competitive ones.

In order to disavow backlinks, you will first need to perform a complete link audit to see which sites are directing to your website. There a few tools you can use to make this easier. Moz, for example, has an Open Site Explorer tool that can list all of your website’s backlinks, anchor texts, and the spam score for each site with a backlink to your own. You can then download your backlink portfolio into a spreadsheet.

Once you have done this, you can add a disavow column and filter them to include only the spammy backlink domains. Add a second column to help search engines understand which domains to disavow. The domains in this column should look like this: “disavow:spammydomain.com”

Moz makes it easy to tell which backlinks are low quality with their spam score indicator. Anything with a spam score higher than 4 is cause for concern and anything with a spam score of 7 and higher should be disavowed.

Finally, try reaching out to these sites to have them remove the link, if they do not respond, you will have to submit your disavow file. In order to do this, you will need to download your disavow spreadsheet as a .txt file and submit it to Google’s Disavow tool.

Contact StatCounter Today

As you can see, a strong backlink portfolio is incredibly important to the health and authority of your website and should be a part of your overall SEO strategy. While you’ll need to be careful in your tactics, acquiring backlinks to your website is essential, and it’ll surely pay off. With StatCounter, you can track all the outbound links on your site, which can be beneficial if others contact you about disavowing a link on your site. Aside from that, you can rely on the detailed metrics from our web tracker to monitor your website and the traffic you acquire, which you can then use to determine which pages of your site need work, as well as which areas are performing well.

If you have any questions or comments, you can contact StatCounter member support by completing the form below.

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