Never before SEO has been so important and at the same time so complex as it is today. Whatever your business goals, you won’t achieve them without a decent online presence that is measured solely in the visibility level of your website. While backlinks make a huge part of the plot, many people still underestimate the significance of building them the right way, which often costs them dearly. 

If you are not quite sure which backlinks can bring you high positions in search results and which ones can get you into serious troubles, read on to find out what is the difference between good and bad backlinks.

 

What Are Backlinks?

Just one of the myriad of tools used by search engines to figure out how to rank the search results, backlinks are technically just links from one site to another. However, the whole concept is not so straightforward given that Google, Bing, and other search engines use them to determine the ‘worthiness” or authority of a particular website.  Seasoned SEO experts who have been in the industry for many years remember times when Google didn’t throw upon a huge number of auto-generated backlinks but those times are gone. Nowadays, only backlinks that come from trustworthy and authentic sources have chances to be recognized as quality links.

 

What Are Good Backlinks?

 

In short, a good backlink is the one that links to a highly-authoritative site in the eyes of a search engine, relevant to the content, and high on power. To give you an example, let’s take SirLinksalot Backlinks created by SEO veterans well-versed in different techniques of quality link building. They do not hide that they always rely on the so-called Holy Trinity of link quality: relevance, authority, and power. 

 

However, when many think that the more of all the three components a link has, the merrier, it is not quite true. The art of SEO is to know how to compensate for not enough relevance or power taking advantage of the other two elements. In addition to the aforementioned links, the backlinks below are also considered good:

• Links from sites with high traffic
• Links from sites with high page rankings
• Natural, non-spammy backlinks 
• Those where anchor text uses relevant keywords 

 

What Are Bad Links?

Quite simply, bad links are everything that good links are not. They link to completely irrelevant sites where content has nothing in common with yours. Such backlinks not only look completely unnatural and can be frustrating for readers but they also will tempt Google to sink your website forever. Hence avoid building backlinks that are:

• Irrelevant to your industry
• Involved sites associated with poor practices and spam
• Suggest using so-called link farms
• Hidden or broken

 

Of course, the whole idea of backlinking is far more intricate, therefore it is really hard to go into details within the frames of just one article. If you want to become an expert on this topic, you will have to learn SEO basics and get some field experience. While you are still mastering your skills, stick with the high-quality links to avoid serious penalties.