Links are what makes websites perform. So let’s get right to it.
The good, the bad, and the ugly:
- Good: A good link is a natural(ish) link which is used in context. Think of it as a citation. If I am talking about McDonald’s coffee burns and mention Liebeck vs McDonald’s I would link to it just like I did in this sentence. This is a good link and it will definitely improve the visibility and ranking of your website in search results.
- Bad: A bad link is when you just obtain a link from some irrelevant, unrelated place on the web and drop your desired anchor text into the link. A few of these are fine if you are simply listing yourself with Yelp, AVVO and other relevant websites. This type of link is generally useless, or worse than useless since it is wasting time.
- Ugly: An ugly link is detrimental to your website’s performance. Bad links live in “bad neighborhoods” as Google calls them. The easier a link is to get, the worse it is for you.
Why?
When search engines were first invented, they needed a way to rank the pages. It was only a matter of time before 100 different lawyers wanted to rank for “car accident”. So, they went by “popularity”. The number of links and the text used for the link greatly impacted a site’s performance in search. Even in 2016, links are still the #1 ranking factor, however Google has gotten much, much better at determining the topical relevance of a link, a sentence, a paragraph, a page, an entire website, and even how geographically relevant it is to you. They have patents on these things their engineers have filed who design the algorithms and artificial intelligence is even at play, monitoring user behavior and learning.
Examples
Good links: Chiropractors, local car mechanics, other attorneys, news outlets
Bad links: Random directories, press releases, links from pizzerias
Ugly links: Reciprocal links, links from low quality websites, links in spun articles, other web spam.
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