It is impossible to do SEO without building the relevant links for your site. Inbound links are the most weighted signals of relevancy in Google’s algorithm. Google considers the inbound links as votes that your website has useful content.

It is the most significant factor that the links which you earn should be from relevant, well known, and authoritative sources. It’s not only the number of links but quality matters. The more number of links from non-relevant, unknown websites will not help you to rank well. Only good quality links can get traffic to your website.

An ideal link comes from a site that gets a lot of traffic, where the users will follow the link from that site to yours. The other site also needs to be an authority, itself having lots of sites linked to it, and lots of sites linking to the specific page that is linking to you. The page or even the whole site should be topically relevant to your site. The link should be featured high on the page in the actual page content, and ideally include an important keyword in the anchor text.

How do bad links affect SEO?

A “bad link” can hurt your site—it could be a spam signal, or in extreme cases, actually get your site penalized. Paid links are also considered as bad links since they can affect your SEO badly. Google wants to see the links you earned but if you are buying them, then it’s again standard. If Google identifies that you have purchased the link then you may get penalized for that. 

If you have a local business and you are getting backlinks from foreign sites, then this is also a bad link. For example, if you have a coffee shop in Canada, then there is no reason to get a link from a US site. 

You need to focus on reciprocal links too. It is easy for Google to detect the reciprocal links and they are devalued. If you have a few reciprocal links that’s okay but if there are a lot of these types of links then it may harm your performance and Google can consider that you are not getting links because of your valuable content. 

It’s obvious you should avoid getting links from hacked sites. The links from PBNs and blog networks are also not considered valued links. Google penalizes the blog network as they manipulate the algorithm.

Good links are all about relevancy. Keep in mind that any link that is not coming from a related or relevant source is a bad link.

With recent updates to the algorithm, Google says it now simply ignores or devalues bad links instead of actively penalizing sites. However, Google adjusts the algorithm daily, and we never know what changes might come in the future. The best strategy is to avoid questionable or obviously bad links altogether, so your link profile looks natural and organic.

Link Analysis for SEO

When you start SEO work on a site, first of all, you need to do a thorough analysis of inbound links of the site. You need to check the broken links and links that are not working. It’s a manual process, but there are several tools that are available to help you. There are two most famous tools, Moz and Majestics used for pulling link profiles. Ahref is also one of the most used tools. Each tool has its own crawler that follows the link trails of millions of sites on the internet. Since each crawler crawls things differently, each tool will pull a list of links that is slightly different. 

It’s not only analyzing the link profile of your own website. After this, you also need to analyze the competitors link profile. You will not only get the insights into why a competitor might be outranking you, you’ll find opportunities for building links to your own site.