4 Problems With Backlinks and How You Can Solve Them
When SEO is brought up in conversation, it usually goes straight to keywords. What doesn’t get enough attention is backlinks. No backlinks, issues with do-follow backlinks, and backlinks that are just broken are all issues that can sink a site.
Problems with backlinks aren’t permanent but they do take a bit of work, and sometimes luck from the SERP gods, to solve. Let’s start by looking at 4 common problems that website owners face when dealing with backlinks.
1. Broken backlinks
A broken backlink is an incoming link that leads to an “error 404” page on the target website. This is a problem because people don’t like clicking on a link and seeing an error. They want to find what they’re looking for and move on.
Broken backlinks indirectly harm your SEO and can affect your bounce rate, and conversions, and make your site feel abandoned. Think of it this way, would you want to go to a business that had a bunch of empty rooms or broken windows? No, you would pass it up and go somewhere else.
How do broken backlinks happen?
It’s just one of those things that just happens. Think of it as the maintenance needed to keep a site healthy—you’re going to have to check on a regular basis if you have any broken links in general, not just broken backlinks.
Solution
Broken backlinks are simple to fix but can get really tedious, depending on the size and age of your website. If it’s a new site, then you could probably fix this on your own by using a broken backlink checker extension on Google Chrome. If you have a sizable site, then you might need something like a SaaS to help you out.
After you find the broken backlinks, then you have to put in some leg work:
- Your first option is to reach out to the hosting site to change the link.
- Second, you can set up 301-redirects to other pages on your site
- Third, you can just replace or recreate the content
- Finally, you can make a hard 404 page
2. do follow backlinks
Link juice is the stuff that propels a site to the first page on a SERP. A do-follow backlink tells Google how to rank your site. This makes them extremely valuable and important to track.
So, what are the issues that revolve around them if they’re so great? Well, getting them in the first place is one, and getting poor-quality do-follow backlinks is another.
How harmful are poor-quality backlinks?
Imagine having someone with the worst reputation possible, introduce you to a crowd of people. How do you think that those people, who don’t know you, are going to think about you? Probably not good.
This is how poor-quality backlinks affect your site. It takes a huge chunk out of your SEO and PageRank on Google. You have to identify these poor-quality backlinks and handle them as soon as you find them.
Can you influence high-quality do-follow backlinks?
Yes, to a certain extent. The quality of your content is going to determine if a high-quality site is going to link back to you. While quality is subjective, and not a guarantee to get backlinks, it’s still something that you can control.
Solution
The solution to getting high-quality backlinks is pretty straightforward. You have to create great content, network with high authority sites, guest post on those sites, and kind of hope that you get lucky. The more of these activities that you do, the better the odds are that a high-quality site will link back to you.
Poor quality backlinks are another issue. Google doesn’t penalize you for having spammy backlinks anymore but that doesn’t mean that you ignore them. Identify the bad backlinks with a tool, or SaaS option, find out where they are coming from, request removal from those sites, and create and submit a disavow file to Google.
3. No backlinks
It’s debatable if having no backlinks is worse than having poor-quality backlinks. This is a huge issue because your site isn’t getting any kind of attention. Now, this is typically an issue for brand-new sites with little to no content. The solution should be a bit obvious.
Solution
You have to start producing content, mid-tier quality is fine, and get something up on your site. You need to give high-quality sites something to actually link to, that means content. Now, once you get some content posted what else can you do?
Take a look back at the tips for getting high-quality backlinks. Guest post, network, and just keep up with it until you start seeing backlinks for your site. Again, make sure that you’re using a tool, like a SaaS, to track the backlinks leading to your site.
4. Over Optimized backlinks
Problems with backlinks aren’t limited to something bad, sometimes doing the right thing too often is the problem. Now, what does an over-optimized backlink look like? Well, it’s a collection of backlinks that all anchor to the same set of keywords.
Think of keyword spamming, link spamming, and other black hat SEO tactics. A backlink profile is supposed to be natural. Some things, like websites all linking to the same keyword, send a warning sign to search engines.\
Solution
You need a diverse set of backlinks coming from a number of different websites. This can be a bit difficult since your influence on backlinks is limited, but there are some things that you can do.
You can start by using a tool, or SaaS option, to identify problematic backlinks. Then you identify which websites are linking to your site and reach out to them to change which keywords they’re linking to. You can also try creating a disavow file and sending it to Google.
Conclusion
Fixing problems with backlinks is simple but it does require a bit of work. You don’t have a lot of control over what website is going to link to your site. This takes a lot of control out of your hands.
Using a SaaS-based tool is going to be your best bet when looking at how to solve issues with backlinks. With a SaaS-based tool, you can track poor-quality backlinks and identify where they are coming from. A good SaaS tool will act like a one-stop shop for all your SEO and even content production/management needs.
Don’t let backlink issues keep your site from ranking number one on the SERP.