Techssocial | When appropriately utilized, backlinks are one of the most effective ways to improve your SEO rankings. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, they can also be a very costly mistake: bad backlinking practices can lead to penalties from search engines, and the loss of backlinks can cause a sudden and drastic drop in rankings. So how do you make sure that doesn’t happen to you? The answer lies in creating a healthy backlink profile that your website will benefit from. To do that, you’ll need to diversify your backlink portfolio. This comes with a multitude of benefits. But before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s turn to the basics: what is backlink diversification?
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What does it mean to diversify your backlink portfolio?
Have you ever heard the expression “don’t put all your eggs in one basket”? The SEO version of that is “don’t put all your backlinks on one website”. Not only is it suspicious, but it is also risky. Since backlinks are on someone else’s website, you have no control over them. If all your backlinks are on one website and the web administrator decides to remove them, or the website goes down, you lose out. And since backlinks are essential to growing a small business online, this is a risk you don’t want to take. Instead, you should put backlinks on as many different websites as you can. That’s the most important and obvious part of diversification. However, it isn’t the only one. To truly diversify your backlinks, you also need to link to a variety of different pages and use different anchors, giving you the healthiest backlink profile.
Why is it important to diversify your backlink portfolio?
It is possible to rank without many diverse backlinks. In fact, some websites use nothing but their own PBNs to link back to their main website. But that’s not the best practice, and it can easily backfire. A diverse backlink profile, on the other hand, comes with great benefits.
You’ll achieve greater authenticity and avoid penalties
In the early days of SEO, people frequently abused the power of backlinks for SEO. They’d set up other websites that existed for the sole purpose of hosting backlinks. Or they’d spam another website with comments that linked back to their homepage. Naturally, this made it harder for Google to assess the quality of a website properly. So the algorithm evolved to improve the detection of various link schemes. These days, it is much harder to trick Google with such linking practices. One of the main reasons for that is that Google looks closely at the sources your backlinks come from now.
If all your links are coming from the same website, this is a red flag for search engines. The immediate suspicion is that you’re running some kind of scam where you use another website as a backlinks mine. If this turns out to be true, you can incur severe penalties. Even if it doesn’t, the mere suspicion will be enough to prevent you from reaping all the benefits of backlinks. On the other hand, if you have backlinks coming from different sources, your link profile will appear more organic, authentic, and credible, which will, in turn, help you rank better.
You’ll receive a better mix of traffic
It’s important to remember that backlinks aren’t there just as a signal to search engines. They’ll also be seen by actual readers, making them a great way to direct traffic to your website. But if you only put backlinks on one website, you’re always reaching roughly the same audience – the users of the website you’ve chosen. That’s not a big pool of potential visitors to target. By diversifying the sources of your backlinks, you target a much broader and more diverse audience too. Among all those people, you’ll surely find someone who fits your demographic and becomes your customer after following a backlink.
You’ll expand your sphere of influence
Backlinks create a connection between you and other websites. Most of your backlinks will (and should) probably be on websites in the same industry as yours. But not all websites that host your backlinks will cover the same niche within that industry. And some of your hosts may even be in a completely different business. By diversifying your backlinks, you can create connections with all these different people, websites, and companies, thus expanding your sphere of influence outside of your niche.
You’ll become more visible online
Not all backlinks will make you equally visible online. Contextual links with natural anchor text, for example, won’t garner the same results as branded links where the anchor is the name of your business. But both serve a purpose. And the more different links on different websites you have, the greater your chances of landing a highly visible link.
You’ll become more resilient to algorithm changes
Search engines rely on highly sophisticated and highly complex algorithms. This makes algorithms incredibly powerful in the world of SEO – they are the ultimate judge of the success of all your SEO strategies. Search engines are aware of this. That’s why they are constantly tweaking, updating, and improving their algorithms. Sometimes, these changes are minimal. Other times, they make a huge difference. Sometimes when these significant changes happen, they affect the very practice of SEO, making particular strategies obsolete and uplifting others. If you’re heavily relying on a strategy that the new algorithm discourages, you’ll most certainly see a drop in rankings.
This is why it is risky to put all your backlinks on one website. Even if that tactic works for the moment, what will you do if the algorithm changes to discourage such backlink practices? This goes back to the analogy of eggs in a basket: if you put all your eggs in a single basket and the algorithm suddenly decides that the whole basket is no good, you’ll lose all your eggs. A more diverse backlink profile, on the other hand, will protect you from sudden ranking drops due to algorithm changes.
Some tips on how to diversify your backlink portfolio
As you can see, there is no question as to whether you should diversify your backlink portfolio. The only question is how to do it. The best way is consciously seeking to diversify the host websites for your backlinks. In practice, this means reaching out to different websites and asking them to add your backlinks to their content, guest blogging on various websites, and building relationships with different businesses that might mention you on their pages. High-traffic websites targeting a demographic that might be interested in your services should be a priority. But don’t let that limit you – the whole point is to branch out.
Jennifer Tran is an avid blogger who first started writing on her personal blog when she was only 15. Today, more than a decade later, she writes professionally for AZ Citation Services and similar websites in between starting her own online business and taking care of her three dogs.