All backlinks were NOT created equal. That should come as no surprise. You can get 5,000 links from quality sites, but if they’re all on the same server Google isn’t going to give you NEARLY the authority you would get if they were spread out across many servers around the world.
This is only one of several things you need to know when it comes to building good, powerful backlinks!
Whether you’re linking to your money sites from your own in-house blog network … from RankCrew, or you’re going out and manually building links yourself, keeping the 5 characteristics below in mind will help you stay safe in Google, while increasing your ranking:
1. Anchor Text diversity! This, of course, applies to all of your backlinks as a whole, but it is crucial these days, making it the #1 characteristic!
You want your money site’s brand and URL variations to be used as the anchor text of your links more than any other text/keyword. Your primary keyword should be less than 10% of your overall anchors and less than 5% is usually best.
On top of your overall anchor text being diverse, the backlink profile of the sites that are linking to you should be good as well. If they are obviously over optimized, a link from them isn’t going to be as powerful (if it is at all) than it would be if it had a more natural backlink profile.
2. Location diversity: It isn’t enough for your backlinks to be coming from different c-class IP’s. They need to be coming from different servers in different geographical locations. This is usually only a concern if you’re linking from your own sites, but it is something to always keep in mind.
3. Natural On-Page Factors: Many blog networks get flagged by Google because of “thin content,” as Google call it. A thin site is a low-quality site that doesn’t have much more than some content, a few categories and a few things in the sidebar. Add relevant images, embed videos and have several related categories along with legitimacy pages (about, contact, privacy, etc.) and you’re good to go.
4. Not a Link Farm: If the site/page is full of other external links then it’s a good indication that the link is not going to help you and might even hurt you. A handful of outgoing links is perfectly fine, but if they are placed artificially or via unmoderated comments then stay away.
5. Indexed and has PR: Any site that isn’t indexed in Google should be avoided when it comes to link building. And while no PageRank doesn’t necessarily mean the site is bad, if a site does have PR, it’s a good indication that it’s not penalized or seen as spam.
Keep these characteristics in mind when building backlinks and you will have little to worry about, while increasing the authority and ranking of your websites!
i would apply these points while getting quality backlinks for my blog….thanks for sharing this post
Good points made in this blog. I would say diversity of links is the key. I’d also say branded anchors are becoming more and more important as they legitmize you as an entity in the eyes of the big G. Keep posting this good stuff!