Key Takeaways
Understanding Link Velocity: Maintain a natural link acquisition rate that aligns with your website’s authority and growth to avoid the potential negative effects. Rapid, unnatural growth in backlinks can trigger red flags for search engines.
Diversifying Backlink Sources: Utilize various methods and sources for your backlinks rather than relying on a single strategy like guest posting. This diversification helps keep your backlink profile appearing natural and balanced.
Backlink Building for New Websites: Prioritize content creation before link building. For a new website, develop 20-30 pieces of content before starting to acquire 5-10 backlinks in the first month. Increase gradually, capping at 30 links per month.
Strategy for Established Sites: An established site can start with 10-15 backlinks in the first month with a maximum of 30 per month thereafter. Focus on enhancing link quality rather than quantity.
Avoiding Low-Quality Backlinks: Steer clear of link farms and low-quality PBNs. Focus on acquiring backlinks from sites that are relevant to your niche, get organic traffic, and feature high-quality content.
Link Velocity and Keeping Your Backlink Profile Looking Natural
Before creating backlinks for your site, you need to understand two key concepts to avoid trouble with search algorithms.
The first is link velocity, which is the rate at which you acquire backlinks.
Google has indexed and analyzed millions of websites, and it’s crucial to maintain a link velocity that aligns with your site’s authority and trustworthiness.
If you start acquiring backlinks faster than Google expects for a site of your caliber, you might face negative effects if your link-building methods are questionable.
The second concept involves keeping your backlink profile looking natural.
This means diversifying your sources of backlinks and the methods you use to acquire them.
For instance, relying solely on guest posting can disrupt the balance of your backlink profile and trigger red flags in Google’s algorithm.
Building Backlinks to a Brand New Website
If you just registered your domain and built your website, there are a few things to consider before jumping into acquiring backlinks.
For example, do you have any content on your website?
If the answer is no or close to none, it’s going to look extremely suspicious if your site starts to get backlinks at this point.
So, before you start building backlinks, aim to create at least 20-30 informative pieces of content on your website so you actually have content to build backlinks to.
For local businesses, you don’t have to add that much content but make sure you flesh out your service pages and other important pages on the site plus 5-10 informative pieces of content.
At that point, you can start thinking about building links.
Start by adding 5-10 backlinks max the first month after adding the initial batch of content to your new website.
After that, you can raise that number by 5 for the subsequent months, capping out at 30 links per month.
Building Backlinks to an Established Site
By ‘established’ website, I mean more than just domain age.
A site is considered established if:
- It’s indexed by Google
- Is at least one year old
- It gets at least some traffic and impressions
- It has at least 30 pieces of content (5-10 for local business site)
At that point, it’s not suspicious to start building links to it.
You should still take it slow and not build more than 10-15 backlinks in the first month.
I would still cap link building activities at 30 links per month, however.
At this point, look to increase the link quality instead of quantity if you want to invest more effort and resources into link building.
Why Focusing on Quantity of Backlinks Alone is the Wrong Approach
Now that you know how many backlinks you can safely build per month, I’d like to share my thoughts as to why I think that’s the wrong approach.
If you’re focusing on quantity, I’m assuming you’re buying backlinks.
Also, this most likely means you’re going to compromise on quality of backlinks to hit your target numbers.
When you build backlinks from just about any website that will take your guest post or link insertion offer, you’re bound to run into low quality sites that don’t receive any traffic themselves or aren’t too relevant to your niche.
Links from such websites won’t move the needle for your rankings and, in some cases, Google might even ignore such backlinks or won’t even find them.
In extreme cases, you might even run into PBNs or Link Farms and acquire backlinks that could actually hurt your rankings instead of boosting them.
If this is not you and you know what you’re doing, you can ignore the advice from this section.
But if this is your first rodeo building backlinks, make sure to carefully vet the domains you pick or have a trusted backlink vendor that will do this for you.
How to Recognize Low and High-Quality Backlink Sources
First, you want to rule out the worst types of websites for backlinks – Link Farms and low-quality PBNs (Private Blog Networks).
These sites exist solely to sell backlinks, and Google is likely to ignore any backlink you build from them, making you waste time and resources.
You’ll recognize both by their poor quality content and excessive linking, often to completely irrelevant websites.
Recognizing higher quality PBNs is harder, but tools like Semrush can help check if the site gets traffic and has any legitimate backlinks itself.
Most PBNs, no matter how sophisticated, lack traffic and legitimate backlinks.
Ignore these two types of link sources because, at best, Google will just ignore these backlinks, and at worst, you might encounter toxic websites that actually hurt your rankings.
Recognizing high-quality link sources is easier.
You’ll want to ensure the site:
- Is niche-relevant to your site
- Gets organic traffic
- Has legitimate backlinks pointing to it
- Has decent to high-quality content