While a very important factor of SEO is inbound links, we must be observant that we don’t have any toxic backlinks that will lead to ranking penalties.
Linking building is an essential part of your site and its future success. Inbound links not only factor in search engine rankings, they also bring people to your site who may not have found it otherwise. With that being said, like everything in life, you don’t want to over indulge.
For this reason, you want to ensure that you are always checking your link profile. Doing this will not only help your habit of linking, it will also protect your site.
Understanding a link profile
Basically a site’s link profile refers to links (inbound) directing to your site, and also the features of the links.
What is a link profile?
When the SEO community talk about a site’s link profile, they are generally referring to the inbound links pointing to your site, the text anchor of those links, and how those links were attained.
Google observes all these factors to ensure that links are organic and as clean as possible. Google wants to be sure that there is no purchasing of links and other negative strategies.
For links, it’s about quality not quantity.
Good versus bad link profile
A good quality link profile combines relevant, varied and most importantly, non-spam links. Conversely, bad links don’t contain any of the aforementioned qualities.
Bad Link Profiles:
– Bad link profiles would be purchase/paid blog links.
– Bad link profiles would also come from unrelated or often fake forums/sites.
As mentioned, Google will penalize you for such links.
Good Link Profiles:
– Good link profiles should come from branded anchor text – from high-authority sites.
– Relevant links that are not from high-authority sites are also deemed good links.
Check your link profile
Using Majestic SEO and Moz’s Open Site Explorer are two great options for checking you link profile. Simply type the URL on the site you wish, and you will see its backlink profile!
