Steer Clear From 5 Most Common Backlink Myth in 2021

In this ever-advancing digital world, businesses constantly have to devise new strategies to stay ahead in the competition. Technology encourages these businesses to employ the right tools to stay aside from the risk and grow their business without hurting their budget. With the massive digital transformation because of the pandemic, traditional businesses are flocking to the digital landscape to survive the uncertain times. However, this paradigm shift to the digital landscape adds more challenges for companies to compete and target their customers. And this is where Search Engine Optimization is coming in handy to bridge the gap between customers and businesses on online platforms.

SEO is an essential strategy for every business to increase its brand exposure and customers’ competitive market. This strategy aims to enhance the content’s quality and quantity to reach the target audience and attract leads. As the in-person trades are coming to a halt, the traditional marketing strategies are no longer working to promote the brands. For that instance, businesses must design unique strategies to stay dominant in both conventional and online marketplaces. One of these strategies also includes link building which holds its value to nurture your business for maximum traffic and conversions. Link building services or backlinks is all about getting other websites to link back to your webpage. The process aims at acquiring the value signals from the search engine to build the credibility and relevancy of your website, thus indexing it higher in the SERPs. At first, most people think of it as link spamming, but it does not work like that. In fact, the strategy has its own myths and misconceptions followed, which are entirely unnecessary. With that said, let’s discuss the five most common backlinks myths that you need to steer clear of in 2021. 

BACKLINKS DOES NOT WORK ANYMORE

While hearing the importance of backlinks in the current SEO strategies, you will also hear a myth as link-building is dying in 2021. In fact, the current year has elevated its importance profoundly. Search engine like Google is putting an exceptional value on the backlinks and its vote of confidence for the website. On the other side, it is also hunting down the shady websites that build backlinks with black hat strategies. 

Link building might sound complex, but it is the surefire way to take your website rankings to the next level. Every marketing campaign must include a quality backlink profile to elevate its standards and generate quality traffic. One way to understand that is by looking at some high authoritative websites. You will see one thing in common, which is their backlink profile. That is because Google’s PageRank algorithm loves authority from the influential sites, thus gives a significant boost to the rankings. 

SOCIAL MEDIA LINKS DOES NOT IMPROVE YOUR RANKINGS

The social media signals do not contribute to the rankings factors for your website. Google has made that clear by saying that social media likes, followers, and content does not “directly” impacts the rankings factor. The search engine crawlers do not pass the signals from social media. Those who are not aware of the Google algorithm employ crawler bots that crawl through the links on the page. Upon crawling, these bots also pass the vote of confidence to the links for search engine rankings.  

However, social media does contribute other factors that count as the ranking signals for the search engine. For instance, producing content that engages your social media followers with your website does amplify your rankings factor. Retaining your visitors from social media will add the rankings factors on your website, thus improving its ranking higher in the search engine. In short, the social media links do not have a direct benefit or link-building value signal for your website. But direct and regular traffic from social media to your website can indirectly enhance your website’s organic traffic. In short, social media might not pertain to a link profile. But it does allow the marketers to leverage other ranking signals as retaining the visitors with daily content. 

NO-FOLLOW LINKS RECEIVE NO LINK JUICE

While building backlinks, you might be aware of the terms do-follow and no-follow links. Those who do not know, do-follow are the links that pass the authority signal and directly affect the search engine rankings. Meanwhile, no-follow links divert the signal passing factor and will not pass the ranking attributes. As said earlier, the search engine uses crawler bots that crawl through the links through the webpages. While crawling, it also measures the do-follow and no-follow links present on the webpage. 

The no-follow links do not pass any signals to the search engine to improve the website’s rankings. However, it does have some indirect effect on your SEO strategy of the website. Google’s Penguin update states that no-follow backlinks do impact the traffic boost of your website. These links can not only improve the brand exposure but also builds credibility through resourceful information. They mainly help create a backlink profile that can assist you in enjoying some do-follow backlinks. 

For instance, commenting on the blogs regularly with the no-follow links will allow you to acknowledge the authoritative sites. When you ask them for a do-follow link, they will respond and give you a quality backlink for your website. This way, you do not have to send emails to the websites and follow-up on social media just to get a do-follow backlink. 

HIGH DOMAIN AUTHORITY OFFERS QUALITY BACKLINKS

We have become so dependent on the backlinks for SEO that we have entirely forgotten that they can also hurt the website’s performance. Most marketers measure the quality of the backlink with the domain authority of the placement website. The domain authority or trust flow is merely third-party metrics that do not define the link quality. They are the search engine’s ranking score that only predicts how likely the website will rank in the SERPs. On the other side, the domain authority never passes the ranking signal to the pointing do-follow link. 

Currently, there are only a few factors that determine the quality of the backlinks. These include the anchor text, linking domain relevancy, its traffic, and its value. Marketers must focus on these factors and create relevant and engaging content for the search engine. The domain authority should not worry anyone to identify the value of the backlinks. However, ignoring the relevancy of the anchor text’s niche and context can significantly hurt the backlink quality. 

Also Read: Is Social Media Marketing Dead?

SEO IS ALL ABOUT BACKLINKS

Backlinking is an essential component of an off-page SEO strategy. Just because there are no new tactics in recent years and marketers are putting a prime focus on backlinking make it the sole propriety metric of SEO. It might sound more of a misconception rather than a myth. However, backlinking is not the only fruitful search engine optimization strategy that can deliver the value of ranking to your website. Numerous other aspects also come into play to optimize the performance of your website. 

Today, Google promotes many new SEO strategies that are more worthwhile for your website to rank top in the SERPs. Google counts not only backlinks but mobile responsiveness, voice search keywords as well as video content on your website. Google also encourages the websites to perform technical SEO to improve the user experience and optimize the indexing process during crawling. Conducting the off-page and on-page SEO of the website will help enhance the relevancy of the website, thus boosting the performance of quality backlinks. There is a lot to pay attention to, and just focusing on backlinking can hurt your rankings and business credibility. 

FINAL WORDS

Backlinks are vital for any online business. Most beginners follow the myths that are either outdated or have become black hat strategies. SEO is continuously evolving to benefit businesses to reach their audience. Staying updated with the latest developments and changes can quickly adapt to the change and leverage them to outranking the competitors.