Fear, uncertainty and doubt: some webmasters change good links

Many webmasters are rattled by Google’s recent updates. Although links are still very important, some people even want to change perfectly fine high quality links. Is this really necessary? How can you save time when improving your backlink profile?

backlink solution

Do not delete good backlinks

In an online forum, a webmaster asked the following question:

“Got an unsolicited citation from a media source but they used anchor text that I have been penalized on. FUD! Should I ask them to change it? By doing that I make a natural link unnatural, and Googlebot will detect that change (obvious tinkering). Nevertheless, I do have an OOP [over optimization penalty] and received the infamous link warnings about 5 months ago.”
 

Save time and focus on good links, not on bad links

A single backlink from a media source won’t cause problems. Actually, that kind of link is exactly the kind of link that Google wants to see. Other people link to your site because they find it good, newsworthy or interesting.

Although it helps to remove obvious fake backlinks to your website, you shouldn’t invest too much time in trying to delete bad links:

  1. It’s often not possible to delete a bad link.
  2. You might accidentally delete a good backlink.
  3. You still need good backlinks to improve your rankings.

A competitor can quickly build hundreds of bad backlinks to your site with a spamming tool. Getting rid of these links can be very difficult and time-consuming.

If you concentrate on building good backlinks, these good backlinks will have more power than the bad backlinks and your rankings will increase.

How to judge the quality of a backlink

You do not need special metrics to judge the quality of a web page. You can judge the quality of a link with these simple questions:

  1. Does the linking page look good to the average web surfer?
  2. Does the page have interesting content?
  3. Is the content somewhat related to my website?
  4. Does it make sense if the web page links to your site?

If you can answer all questions with “yes” then you should try to get a backlink from that page.

Backlinks are still the most important signal that influences the position of your web pages in Google’s search results. Optimize your web pages for your keywords to show Google that your website is relevant to a topic. Then get high quality links to make sure that Google gives your web pages high rankings.

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Tom Cassy

Tom Cassy is the CEO of SEOprofiler. He blogs about search engine optimization and website marketing topics at “http://blog.seoprofiler.com”.

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