Backlink analysis, tips to perform it in the most professional way

Inevitably, any talk about SEO and organic visibility ends up dealing with the complex topic of backlinks: this word simply identifies any link that any web domain directs to the pages of our site, but behind this basic definition there is a real world. Even today, to summarize in a very extreme way, backlinks are in fact one of the ranking factors on Google, and for many “the” factor par excellence, and more generally they represent a kind of “vote” towards the page that receives them, understood and followed even by the search engine.

What is a backlink and what it means

Also called inbound links, incoming links or one way links, backlinks are links that start from one Web site and point to a page on another Web site.

Literally, this term denotes a “backlink”, but there are also those who prefer the expression inbound link to emphasize the “direct inward” effect of this reference.In any case, we are talking about a Web page that, for the sake of insight, citation, or others, carries a hyperlink within the text to one or more pages of our Web site. This is a useful process and used especially in the context of link building activities and in building a network of links that come precisely from external sites, aimed at increasing the popularity, reliability and ranking of our site, enhancing what is already good in the published content.

In fact, Google and other major search engines consider backlinks as “votes” for a specific page, and taking the concept to an extreme, pages with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings.

Why it is important to get backlinks for SEO

As is often repeated, search engine ranking follows rules, criteria and parameters that are known only to Google: this does not detract from the fact that over time strategies have been “discovered” and verified that go in the direction desired by Big G, as precisely link building does when carried out in a “natural,” unforced and unashamed manner. Receiving a link from another site means getting a trust signal, because it is as if that page communicates to the search engine that we deserve trust, gaining authority in its eyes and, as a consequence, also for readers and users.

In essence, then, backlinks obtained from our site are a potential signal to search engines of the presence of other Web players vouching for our content: if many sites link to the same Web page or Web site, search engines may infer that the content is worth linking to and therefore also worth showing within a SERP.

Thus, again theoretically and very succinctly, earning backlinks can have a positive effect on a site’s ranking or search visibility. In fact, backlinks formed the basis of Google’s original algorithm, known as “PageRank“, and although Google has since made thousands of changes to its algorithm, backlinks remain a key SEO ranking signal.

The characteristics of SEO backlinks

To delve deeper into the value of backlinks, we need to go back to talking more generally about how links and the Web work: hyperlinks are in fact the “glue” that holds the Web together and enable interconnection between individual documents on the Web. Internal links are those that point to pages in the same domain, and exist primarily to help people navigate the site and to avoid orphan pages, for example, while external links have a wider range of possible intentions, including:

• Providing more context to the reader.
• Cite or provide a source.
• Recommend something.
• Support an appeal made in the copy.
• Adding authenticity.

In any case, at an ideal level the link should be directed to a page that provides added value to the reader.

This is why search engines recognize that the backlink is valuable and reward the target URL, interpreting the link as intentional and voluntary, the result of some analysis and evaluation (including editorial) of the content on the target web page.

Again in general, then, there are various types of backlinks, which can affect Google’s behavior differently because they communicate very specific information:

Follow or dofollow links are the type of backlink everyone wants, because they explicitly indicate to Google the relevance and relevance of the landing page, signaling Googlebot to follow<