Make no bones about it: Link building is essential to the success of your site.
In addition to being a ranking factor for search engines, inbound links can bring visitors to your site who might not otherwise have found you. Hence, inbound links can be both a direct and indirect source of web traffic.
But, as anyone who has drunk a little too much whiskey will know, you can have too much of a good thing. There’s a fine line between having a good link profile and getting slapped with a penalty.
That’s why checking your link profile can save your site — and help you to stay on track for link-building success.
Read on and find out just how to do it…
What is a link profile?
When we in the SEO community talk about a site’s link profile, we are generally referring to the inbound links pointing to your site, as well as the characteristics of those links.
According to Mark Jackson, in addition to the total number of inbound links, your site’s link profile consists of:
the types of links pointing back to your site;
the anchor text of those links; and
the manner in which those links were acquired.
Google takes the above factors into account to keep SEO as clean, pure and white-hat as possible. By looking at more than just the sheer quantity of inbound links to a site, Google can prevent SEOs from employing aggressive or “unnatural” link-building tactics meant to game the rankings, such as buying a lot of high-quality links that go live all at the same time.
Let me break down each of the above points for you so that you understand the significance of each.
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