In Digital marketing, building quality backlinks for search ranking is key a key factor – In the journey of making a website rank in the top of search results, every digital marketer has to find and build quality and authoritative backlinks for online visibility for search keywords. Yes, backlinks have always been a dominant ranking signal of the Google’s search algorithm and when realized the fact, people started cultivating backlinks from almost sites without even checking the quality of the site from which they get the link from! Now the question is, will backlinks lose their relevance?

Google Authorship

Google will be giving importance to authorship of a site rather than backlinks. By authority, Google means trust and quality. The concept of Google authorship works by linking all the content you create to your Google+ profile.

Why is it relevant?

Authority is relevant because it adds trust and establishes reliability and that is exactly what Google is looking for. Google wants researched writings from actual specialists, not just bloggers without credentials as it is working incessantly to show up the most pertinent, highest quality search results to the audience.

Improving authority of a site means giving value to the Google+ profile. Someone who considers Google+ as a part of the scenario of gaining best ranking opportunities in the Google search needs to be furiously following some of the tactics listed below:

1. Build lasting relationships within Google plus users

It is not that you should build a large number of followers. Active, lasting relationships and partnerships are worth. The reference or citations of active Google+ users to your profile has a vital role in deciding the authority of your site to Google.

2. Score quality links from reputed websites

Be active on Google+ such that other reputed websites would love to link to your profile. If you are personally being interviewed by a website, ask if they would like to link to your profile.

3. Make use of Google Authorship for the content you create

Higher the quality of the content that you produce on trusted sites, higher will be the authority given to your profile.

Links still matter?

No doubt links from a trusted site transmit authority and it is not about to change. The thing that is changing is how Google evaluate links. You cannot know which links are worthy and which all links that the search engine will ignore.

You don’t seek to cultivate a lot of backlinks everyday. That is, link building is not that important, but ‘quality link building‘ is still important! Building a quality link from a high reputed site will do far better than lot of backlinks from low quality sites. Moreover, bad backlinks can even affect your site negatively.

You might have seen many examples of that. There are sites that are ranked top in search results but with very few backlinks. May be the site is rich with content or authority. But it doesn’t mean that backlinks has lost its relevance.

Below listed are some of the tips that can be followed to see an increase in the number of backlinks to your website.

• Create valuable content

With Google’s latest changes and updates in Penguin 4.0, it is important to provide fresh information that will be useful to the readers. The updated algorithm wipes out spam websites that has duplicate content or ones that has over used keywords.

• Update website

As we know, smartphone usage has become prominent and so your website needs to be optimized and responsive to all mobile devices.

Google is now slowly phasing out those websites that aren’t mobile optimized to make sure that the audience gets better experience with every site they visit.

• Tone down keyword usage

Today, focus is much more on the quality of content. Earlier, it used to be the keywords or anchor text contributed to a website. From Google’s point of view, stuffing keyword could get you penalized.

Backlinks that are dumb, spammed or that just don’t make any sense are losing their importance for sure. But a quality backlink is always worthy! It still continues to be one of the key factors or a dominant ranking signal in Google’s search algorithm.

Author: STEPS