Links to your website are really important, however, the quality of those links is even more important.
Why?
Poor quality links can have a really detrimental effect on your organic ranking. Quality is the key here, not quantity.
Google’s algorithms are able to distinguish between good and bad quality links and will penalise you, if you have too many low quality links. But just a few top quality links can make a really big difference.
What are low quality links?
The definition is a little difficult to pin down, but as a general rule of thumb if the website is low quality, then so is the link. Poor links may look unnatural and could make the user think that your website doesn’t not have the quality or content good enough to gain its own natural links from other sites.
Some poor quality links are easy to spot, as they look spammy and don’t relate to your website. If a website has a lots of articles that are missing direction, quality and generally lack coherence it may well be that it has been created purely for the purpose of linking other websites and you don’t want to be associated with that.
Types of low quality links
Comment spam links are also bad for your site. These are bots that can access your website’s comment forms and leave spammy messages. You may see more and more than you are asked to prove you aren’t a robot…that’s to try and stop the bots!
Anchor text is an important factor, and you want to see that the majority of links to your site have anchor text that uses your brand name or website name. Finding a high number of links with keyword optimised anchor text may be a sign of a poor quality link and Google will spot this.
Some sites are created to look like reputable, related, quality sites in order to make the links look good quality. These sites tend to have lots of duplicate content that has been taken from other sites – Google will find them out, but a link from a site like this is bad news.
If your business is based in the UK, and does most of its business here too then it will look odd if you have lots of links from other countries, as they just won’t look natural. Removing these links will help your backlink profile.