Factors to Consider When Building Backlinks in 2023
Building backlinks is a strategy in which external or third-party websites link to your own website. This link-building strategy has remained one of the essential ranking factors for websites over the years. And 2023 is not an exception.
But since SEO is a constantly evolving landscape, not all the factors that you used to consider when building backlinks in previous years might help you now. And that’s where things can get a bit challenging, especially if you’re new to this field. But don’t worry because this guide has got you covered.
Here, we’ll highlight the essential factors to consider when building backlinks in 2023. So, let’s delve in.
1. Relevance of Websites and Anchor Texts
One of the first factors you must consider when building backlinks in 2023 is relevancy. This means two things:
- The websites you want to either get links from or link to must be related to your industry, niche, or topic.
- The piece of text (anchor text) used to link to the website must be relevant to the target keywords and content.
Doing so will help search engines understand two major things about your website:
- What your website is really about.
- Why should your website rank for specific keywords?
And these understandings will eventually help your website rank for your target keywords.
But now, you might wonder how search engines can check the relevancy of the anchor text and a third-party website pointing to your website or to which you’re linking. The answer to this question lies in Natural Language Processing (NLP).
NLP is a branch of artificial intelligence that allows computers to understand human text. And since search engines are nothing but computers, NLP is one of the algorithms they use to understand and check the relevancy of text according to the context.
So, if your website or blog is related to gardening, they must get backlinks from a platform related to their niches instead of cooking. Similarly, for a gardening-based blog or website, the anchor text used to link to that website must be like the following:
- Gardening tips.
- How to grow tomatoes.
And that’s how the relevancy of anchor text and the websites has become essential to consider when building backlinks in 2023.
2. Quality of Backlinks
Those days are gone when search engines used to prioritize websites having a higher number of backlinks. That’s because nowadays, search engines focus more on the quality of backlinks. But what is meant by the quality of backlinks?
Well, when we say, ‘quality of backlinks,’ we are indirectly referring to these two characteristics:
- Trustworthiness.
- Authoritativeness.
This means your backlinks should come from websites considered authoritative and trustworthy in their niches. That’s because such websites can pass more authority and trust to your website, which will eventually help it rank higher in search results. It is similar to getting acknowledgement from a famous personality. But the big question is, how to determine whether a website is authoritative or not?
Well, to determine the authority of a website, one of the first things to do is to determine its domain and page authority scores. As their name suggests, Domain Authority (DA) and Page Authority (PA) are two metrics developed to assess the strength of a website as a whole and its pages. So, use reliable tools to check DA PA scores of a website. Doing so will guarantee accurate results of these (DA and PA) metrics.
Once you’ve done that, you also need to get an estimate of the website’s traffic. And for that, you can use any reliable tool, such as
- Ahrefs.
- Google Analytics.
- SEMrush.
Thus, do these things before reaching out to a website for backlinking. Doing so will help you determine the quality of backlinks, which is one of the critical backlinking factors.
3. Location of the Backlink and Its Relationship With Its Value
It is a fact that every page of a website has a different amount of traffic. Even if someone implements the same SEO strategies on all the pages, every page won’t get the same amount of traffic. Therefore, another essential backlinking factor that 2023 has brought to the table is the location of the page a website is linking to.
For instance, if you’re getting backlinks from or linking to the high-traffic pages of a relevant website like the home page, they will help your website more than others. That’s because such high-traffic pages are more likely to be seen by search engines. On the other hand, if you get backlinks from or link to pages with low traffic, they won’t be as effective as the previous approach. A few prime examples of low-traffic pages are as follows:
- An outdated blog post.
- A poorly optimized product page.
- A page that has been used for internal navigation, like sitemaps.
- A page that has become irrelevant to the target audience, like a product page that is no longer available.
But this doesn’t mean that getting backlinks from or linking to the low-traffic pages won’t help at all. They will still be helpful as long as they are highly authoritative and relevant to the content.
4. The Older, the Better – Age
Christopher Nolan will never risk his movie by offering it to a newbie. The same is the case with the relationship of search engines with backlinks. Therefore, the fourth factor you must consider when building backlinks in 2023 is their age or, according to the example of Christopher Nolan – their experience.
Search engines, especially Google, consider backlinks’ age when ranking websites higher in search results. So, backlinks that have been around for a long time will be more valuable than the newer ones because old age equals trust, which is equivalent to authority.
For instance, if a backlink is older, it means search engines have had more time to assess its quality and the website it is linking to. And that’s the primary reason why search engines prefer older backlinks. If a website to which an older backlink points is still ranking, it is definitely a good sign for that website. So, that’s why age is another factor to consider when building backlinks in 2023.
Conclusion
All in all, search engine algorithms are continuously getting more advanced. Therefore, they have been making it more challenging to rank higher in search results. But challenging is for those who try shortcuts and implement dubious ways to bypass search engine algorithms. This means that as long as you stick to the guidelines of search engines, your website or blog won’t face any issues when ranking.
To put it in the context of factors to consider when building backlinks, we recommend strictly focusing on the relevancy of anchor text and website, authoritativeness, trustworthiness of the website, location, and age of backlinks. If you do that, the backlinking profile of your platform will be fine.
