The logic behind the mechanism was simple: the more links you have, the higher rankings your website gets, the easier it is for users to find you, the more potential traffic you may monetize, eventually. Soon enough rules changed and now you need to be aware of the following key aspects of your linking domains:
1. Relevance of the linking domain
2. Authority of linking domains
3. Anchor type
4. Anchor text
5. Natural growth of the profile
How we came where we are, in the first place
As soon as a website authority has become a business asset, with the growth of the eCommerce global turnover, it has become almost any digital business primary task to try to hack the search engine algorithm and get as many links as possible which resulted into a series of complications made to the algorithm by search engines in order to exclude this sort of competition.
So now, if you have an unhealthy link profile, you easily get penalized by search engines. If you try to trick the algorithm, you get penalized by search engines. If you have no links, you simply have no rankings and people cannot find you either way.
The forbidden fruit
Currently, you are strictly forbidden by search engines from any attempts to gain more links on your own, as this activity may be considered as unnatural. Unfortunately, even if you do nothing for getting backlinks, and you still get wrong ones, search engines don't go into detail about who has placed a 'bad' link and may penalize you anyways.
In case of penalties applied, Google provides you with a more or less restricted access to your backlinks through Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) so that you can check the most suspicious links and remove them using its Backlinks Disavow Tool, for example.
Backlink checkers
Since all Google tools have restrictions for some reasons, a number of digital marketing tools appeared to be useful for providing a clear view into what sort of backlinks, anchors and donors anywebsite has.
Unfortunately, most of them grew into paid services over time, even though some of them used to be completely or partly free at the beginning. Full access to them is based on monthly subscription now, in most cases.
Free services appear now and then, as competition in the segment of digital marketing tools is tight. For example, you can check backlinks free with MegaIndex Backlinks and, which is even more important, you can sort them by unique linking domains and IPs.
This feature makes it possible for you to exclude both blogrolls, and links from domains based on the same IP (considered as a single domain by SEs) thus getting one of the most realistic pictures of your actual backlink profile.
Link building in 2016 is about content
If any 'unnatural' link building activity is considered subject to penalties, what is considered to be 'natural'? As search engines official speakers put it, you simply need to wait while people discover your content, love it and link to it. In this case, MegaIndex Backlinks discovers those links for you and brings all data about them on a plate. Taking into consideration that you need to get natural links from relevant websites, your link building strategy in 2016 needs to have a balanced combination of the three key aspects at least:
1. Content Marketing
2. Social Media Marketing
3. Networking
Read more about what you need to pay attention to while performing your routine backlink check before putting your next link building tasks on your list.
Would you like to check backlinks to your website free? MegaIndex Backlinks doesn't require registration and you can check inbound links to any website.
Discussion