What Are Backlinks? – 11 Most Asked Backlink Questions
The need for high-quality backlink for a site’s reputation is essential for a website to thrive online and stay in the digital competition.
In this post, I will dive into some of the most frequently asked questions regarding backlinks and show how some of these questions can be answered using SEMrush.
What is domain authority and how does domain authority help in SEO?
Domain authority is how well a domain will perform in search engine rankings or best put, it’s the website’s reputation in providing the most relative content to a specific keyword. Domain authority, which was developed by Moz, is calculated by a lot of factors including the total number of inbound links or also called backlinks or also called inbound links.
SEMrush uses Authority Score in measuring a website’s reputability.
Authority Score is our compound domain score that grades the overall quality of a website and tells you how impactful a backlink from a site can be for your SEO. The score is based on the following SEMrush data:
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- Backlink data including referring domains, follow and no follow links, and more
- Organic search data including organic search traffic and keyword positions
- Website traffic data (monthly visits)
Here are the ways on how to check the domain Authority Score using SEMrush:
Backlink Analytics
- In SEMrush dashboard, click Backlink Analytics under Link Building.
- Type in a website URL and press Enter
3. You will be given a quick overview of the sites Authority score along with referral domains, number of backlinks and many more
Moreover, you can identify Authority Scores of multiple websites using SEMrush’s Bulk Analysis
- In SEMrush dashboard, click Bulk Analysis under Link Building.
- Type in multiple website URLs you wish to analyze. You can enter up to 200 URLs/domains, one per line
What is page authority in SEO?
While domain authority measures the reputation of a domain or its subdomains, Page authority (another score developed by Moz) refers to the authoritative strength of a single page and how well it will rank in search engine result pages (SERP). Similar to Domain Authority, Page Authority is measured by a page’s reputability through backlinks.
Here is how to check Page Authority of a website using SEMrush:
- In the Backlink Analytics dashboard, click Backlinks
2. You will then be able to see each of the site pages’ score as measured by SEMrush
What are high authority backlinks and what is the importance of backlinks in SEO?
A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. It’s how many other websites vouched for your page’s reliability and content quality. If many other websites link to your specific page or site domain or the more sites vouches for your domain/page, the more likely Google will acknowledge your site to be as a reliable and worthy source – giving you higher authority and chance to be ranked well in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). The more high-quality inbound links or backlinks a website has, the higher its domain authority is.
What is an example of backlinks?
In my recent blog post “WP Rocket Review – Great WordPress Site Speed Plugin!“, I’ve linked a couple of other websites. See the image below.
Since those 3 are linked to their respective websites, this is a “backlink”.
How to increase domain authority with backlinks and how to find bad backlinks
It is always a good practice to identify and remove backlinks from your site. If you have a significant number of bad links, there’s a big chance that you will be algorithmically downgraded by Google or get penalized.
Good thing SEMrush has a Backlink Audit that can help you improve your website’s SEO by:
- Reviewing all the links within your site
- Analyze whether there are any bad links or suspicious link and identify its level of toxicity
- Send out a warning to the website owner
- And immediately file a request to Google to ignore your toxic backlinks (Delete to disavow)
- Other options include:
- Delete to Remove
- Send the backlink removal requests to domain owners from the Remove tab. We will automatically provide you with the domain owner’s contact info.
- Keep to Whitelist
- If you know for sure that the link is not harmful at all, use the Keep button.
- Delete to Remove
- Other options include:
How to run a Backlink Audit on a site
- In the SEMrush dashboard, click Backlink Audit
- Click the site you wish to analyze. Alternatively, you can add a new site to analyze by clicking NEW BACKLINK AUDIT found in the upper right-hand side of the page
- SEMrush will provide you an overview of your backlink profile
- Overall Toxic Score – the general backlink analysis based on the total number of bad links and level of its toxicity
What is the referring domain in SEO?
Referring domains – domains that link back to our site shows you the number of new, lost and broken referring domains.
Domains by Toxic Score – shows the distribution of all analyzed domains according to their toxic level
- You can then take a deeper look and take suitable actions on these links. Whether you wish to keep, delete to disavow or delete remove the link(s)
What is link building in SEO?
Link building is about a website-to-website relationship. It’s the process of securing a link on their site/page to your site/page. There is no best link building strategy as there a lot of factors on how to conduct it but one thing’s for sure – links are essential to the existence of one’s website and this is how link building helps SEO.
How to do link building for a website?
If you are a beginner with SEO, SEMrush offers such a user-friendly tool called Link Building Tool. This tool guides you on how to increase backlinks for the website through providing you lists of opportunities depending on your target keywords and a user-friendly interface to start running a link building SEO plan that will suit your niche.
What is the competitor’s backlink analysis?
If you want to do a link building strategy but do not know where and how to start, you can start by checking your competitors’ website. Checking out the competition is essential in every business. You can technically gather wealthy insights through competitor backlink analysis – from knowing what they do well to areas where they’re falling short so you can eventually and ideally outperform them.
How to check competitors’ backlinks?
Of course, SEMrush to the rescue here. They’ve built up an easy and user-friendly tool that generates your competitor’s backlink reports for you.
Go to Backlink Analysis > Competitors
2. In the dashboard, you will get:
- Your top competitors with similar backlink profile to your website
- Your top competitor’s authority score
- overall quality and influence of the website in the SEO
- Level of competition
- measured by the number of backlinks of the site and the number of backlinks you have in common
- Common Referring Domains
- number of referring domains that linked back to both your website and your competition
- Total number of referring domains
- total number of domains that links to the given site or domain
- Backlinks
- total number of backlinks of the given site or domain
Using these data, you can analyze their most popular content have based on the pages that are indexed; through the referring domains, you will be able to identify their current partnerships that you may not have and may want to do an outreach campaign to.
- What Are Backlinks? – 11 Most Asked Backlink Questions - March 22, 2020
- WP Rocket Review – Great WordPress Site Speed Plugin! - February 11, 2020
That is really nice to hear. thank you for the update and good luck.
Backlins are core to SEO! The heart of a successful SEO campaign is creating backlinks:)
High-quality backlinks can help to increase a site’s ranking position & visibility in search engine results. Backlinks are still important for SEO performance because they are the foundation of Google’s original PageRank algorithm.