Backlinks

Backlinks are links from external sites (not from your own domain) to subpages of your own domain. From this point of view, backlinks are digital recommendations for your own content and thus for companies. A balanced backlink profile of 80 to 90% DoFollow links and 10 to 20% NoFollow links. This is important because only DoFollow links pass on the so-called “Link Juice”, i.e. the link strength.

What should be considered when selecting potential backlink candidates?

Basically, the most important KPI related to backlinks is not the number of backlinks but the number and quality of the referring domains. The quality of a domain is reflected, for example, in the domain rank (DR; a value from the Ahrefs tool). If possible, this DR should be higher than the DR of your own website.

How do you get such backlinks?

There are sensible and less sensible (Black Hat SEO) measures. Basically, the search engines want the backlinks to develop organically. It is therefore counterproductive to build up an above-average number of backlinks from now on.
The best way to do this is to create unique and valuable content for your customers. Ideally, attention is drawn to the content via relevant social media channels. Popular options here are blogs, guest posts, infographics, industry networks, glossary, etc.

Pro Tipp 1

Getting backlinks is easier than building new ones. Some SEO tools like Ahrefs give the reason why backlinks were lost. A loss can be caused, among other things, by a 404 error on your own target page. If this is remedied, the backlink can be regained.

Pro Tipp 2

Backlinks from relevant domains with a strong DR can help to positively develop the relevance of your own domain. However, what works in the positive also works in the negative. Toxic backlinks can hinder the positive development of your own domain and slow down the success of SEO. This can and should be checked with tools like SEMRUSH or others. If toxic backlinks are identified in this way, they must be excluded from the evaluation using a “disavow file” in the Search Console.