When a website links to your website, a backlink gets created in the bargain. The creation of the backlink is a reflection of confidence in your website’s content, and its value and effectiveness.
Backlinks are said to be integral for the success of SEO as well. The more websites your website can attract, the more search engines will give more priority to your website in search results, as a result, your website’s ranking will improve dramatically, whenever search results in processes keywords that correlate to the topics that your website’s content highlights.
Over the past decade, however, the importance of backlinks has come down significantly. The reason being they have not been able to produce the results expected of them.
Secondly and most importantly, Google realized that a lot of people were indulging in unscrupulous SEO tactics, of which one among them was using hordes of backlinks from important websites, even wherein they were not exactly required.
Google’s algorithm now lays greater stress on the quality and depth of the content including the visual aesthetic aspects of the content like images and video apart from the keywords, in the website rather than on websites that are linked to it. The better the richness and quality of the content, the greater the prominence it will get from Google when it comes to ranking in search results.
The only backlinks that still remain effective and produce the desired results are all difficult to build. They need to adhere to 14 criteria requirements. Even if one of them is not met then the backlink will have no relevance and will not be able to create the desired impact.
Why Backlinks Are Not Working?
There are several reasons. Among them, the most important ones are
Links From Irrelevant Websites
Relevance of backlinks matters to Google. If the backlink has no connection to the content of your website then Google will simply set it aside which in other words means it considers it irrelevant. For instance, if you are in a business that deals with entertainment, then it’s only natural that it has a website as well as backlinks with content that relates to entertainment. Now if it has backlinks that are from an education website, then Google will consider the backlinks irrelevant and of no significance.
Poor Referral Traffic
Attracting backlinks just for the sake of it does not cut ice anymore. It defeats the very purpose and significance of backlinks. It will also not get visitors interested in them as a result of which they will not attract clicks.
What matters is the quality of content in backlinks websites. Only this will get visitors interested in them mad read them, and subsequently fuel greater clicks. The more clicks they attract the more valued they will become.
Now how will you know about the same?
Simple, all you need to do is to check your Google Analytics account and look-up your Acquisition Report. It will show clearly which backlinks websites are attracting clicks and which are not. This will give you an idea of how your strategy is working and what needs to be done to fine-tune it to rectify the flaws.
Improper Links Balance
If your website is not able to attract quality backlinks but rather just builds them up then the effort will be of no significance.
Google only recognizes links that have great content and are attracted to your website. It abhors link building that is manipulative and done from behind and instead appreciates link-building that are organic and is upfront and straightforward. All successful links building campaigns come with good quality backlinks that have great blogs.
So the golden rule here is content matters, great content in a website will attract links on its own rather than forcing them to link.
Insufficient Referring Domains
There is a wrong misconception that a backlink profile with several referring pages will work successfully. But Google does not think so. What matters to Google is the number of referring domains rather than referring pages. Now if your website gets 20 links because it has 20 guest articles then the whole lot will be considered as only one referring domain.
What made referring pages redundant was it was abused. In its initial days in the 2000s, it made link directories and farms a big business. A link placed in a website was scattered in different pages inside of the same website, resulting in scores of referring pages. Google recognized it as a problem as a result of which referring pages soon lost their relevance.
The golden rule is – never attempt to buy links from link farms (getting links from the same website), but instead build links by attracting them from other websites.
Loss Of Backlinks
Backlinks can get lost at times. There could be many reasons for it, ranging from deletion of the page to removal of links from a post; outlived utility value of the page; or page returning a 404 Error.
Now if your website is facing any of the said situations, then the only way out is to fix the errors and ask the source of the backlinks to get back again. Else just update the content on your website.
Better Links Of Competitors
Like you, your competitors too could be getting their websites to attract links and building them up. Now if you have, through your website, been doing this for several months and yet have not been able to attract more links than your competitor’s websites then it’s clear that they have not just more links but are also able to attract more high-class links.
To understand the reason for the same, check Ahrefs or any other backlinks checker tool, you will get an idea of where your website stands. More links do not matter, what matters is the quality of the links.
Finally, the relegation of backlinks can be attributed to the fact that Google today uses more than 200 ranking factors, of which backlinks happen to be one among them. When it is factoring in so many aspects, then counting on backlinks alone does not make sense at all.
Google’s focus is more on content. High-class content matters to it and is what will also make your website mobile-friendly, improve its speed, attract more visitors, and so on.
Conclusion
Backlinks still count. They still work but do not work the way they used to earlier. What actually will work more is high-quality backlinks that have value and are relevant to what your website is all about. This is what will also eventually influence the ranking of your website organically, as well.