Can Any Inbound Linking Hurt My Ranking? Is a question asked many times over buy site owners and was once a difficult question to answer.
When it comes to the fine art of SEO, there a whole bunch of methods that businesses and site owners can use to get ahead. From using keywords in your content, to reducing bounce rate, the list goes on and on! One such method involves link building, such as inbound links from other websites. It has become very popular over the years for helping websites jump up the ranks and land that number 1 spot. But, could it ever do more harm than good?
What Are Inbound Links?
Starting with the term inbound links, it’s a good idea to first understand what exactly they are. Essentially, these are links from other website domains that point to your website. So, for example, if we used a link on Ram Digital that took users to a page on your site. That would be classed as an inbound link for you (and an outbound link for us). They’re also sometimes referred to as backlinks.
Can Inbound Links Hurt Your Ranking?
The algorithms that search engines like Google use to calculate page rank is always kept pretty tightly under wraps. We know a whole lot, but there’s still a great deal we don’t know! Whether or not inbound links can hurt your SEO is something we now know for certain, with different research claiming different answers its still clear bad links can cause harm to your site and get you a manual penalty.
More recent research suggests that receiving inbound links from unreputable or ‘bad’ websites could in fact harm your site, though it’s uncertain how much or for how long the repercussions would last. In general, it’s best therefore to check through your inbound links and make sure they’re from decent websites, deleting the rest before they have a chance to affect your ranking. Websites like unreputable forums, low-quality directories, and private blog networks are all a bad idea in the world of inbound marketing!
Can Other Links Make a Difference?
When it comes to links and SEO, inbound links are the least likely to affect your ranking. It’s outbound links from your own site that you should be more careful with. To help you out and make sure you’re helping rather than harming your SEO, check out these tips:
- Avoid spamming – Search engine’s can now tell whether the outbound links from your site are natural and add value to your reader, or simply being overused to boost your rank. So, don’t go overboard on the links, and make sure they always fit in with your content.
- Opt for reputable sites – Linking to reputable sites is going to help your SEO, whilst linking to dodgy URLs could harm it.
- Linking to .gov and .edu – It’s long been believed that linking to .gov or .edu URLs will boost SEO more than regular sites, but this is definitely a myth. As long as your links are relevant and the sites linked are decent, it really doesn’t matter!
If you’re looking to bump your website up the ranks with inbound and outbound links, it’s best to get a team who knows what they’re doing on your side – which is where we come in! Our team can make sure your links are helping your site rather than hindering it. Taking the work from your hands so you’re free to run your business. Sounds good? Get in touch with us to find out more!
Free Link Audit
Due to the changes Google has made to its view on inbound links over the years. We now have to focus on the question “Can Any Inbound Linking Hurt My Ranking?”
As part of any SEO audit we now also do a backlink audit. This is to check for toxic links which may harm your sites rankings or put your site at risk of a manual penalty from Google.
Once we have this data we can work to remove those links. In order to remove the risk of penalties received for having a bad inbound link profile.