Incoming hyperlinks
Incoming hyperlinks (also called inbound links or backlinks) are all links that lead from other domains to your own web project. All the incoming links together form a website’s backlink profile.
The links in your backlink profile can be roughly divided into two categories, depending on the target link:
Surface links are links to the homepage or different landing pages of your web project. Deep links, on the other hand, are backlinks that lead to a specific subpage of your website. Deep links can also target media content on your website such as videos, images, or documents offered for download (i.e. PDFs). These are also referred to as media links.
Backlinks can also be differentiated from one another in terms of their link source. Search engine optimization distinguishes between content links, sidebar links, and footer links as well as comment links and social signals.
- Content links: content links are links that lead from the text content of another website to your domain. Content links can be either deep or surface links. Hyperlinks like this usually represent a recommendation regarding the contents of your website. Search engine providers also interpret content links as being of strong quality and of relevance. Content links are particularly valuable when it comes to search engine optimization. When evaluating a content link, the search engine takes factors into account such as the link text, the thematic orientation of the linked website, and how trustworthy the link source is.
- Sidebar and footer links: sidebar and footer links have something in common. They are not directly implemented in a web page’s text. They are found in parts of the menu at the side or the end of the page. In the blogger scene, for example, it is common practice to link to friends or topic-relevant blogs in the sidebar. This is known as a blogroll. Footer links are sometimes used on corporate websites to link business partners, customers, industry associations, press commentaries, or sponsors. Since sidebar and footer links used to be used primarily for unnatural link building measures, these types of hyperlinks are of minor importance when assessing a website’s relevance. However, if a backlink profile contains lots of unnatural sidebar and footer links, this can lead to the search engine provider automatically or manually devaluating the website
- Comment links: comment links are hyperlinks in user-generated text content such as blog comments, reviews, or articles in online forums. Many website operators offer visitors the opportunity to comment on content or rate products and services. In some cases, hyperlinks to other websites can also be placed in the respective posts, which, like all other inbound links, appear in the backlink profile of the linked website. Like sidebar and footer links, comment links can be manipulated and it’s easy to create an unnatural backlink profile. In order to prevent spam, hyperlinks in comments are often implemented automatically as nofollow links
- Social signals: in Web 2.0, users have become accustomed to sharing content that they like, think is discussion-worthy, or want to promote with their contacts on social media platforms. These are also hyperlinks that link to the respective website from the social network. These are referred to as social signals. Whether or how search engine algorithms rely on social signals such as likes, shares, and comments to evaluate the relevance of a website is quite controversial – especially since network operators only grant limited access to social media content to search engine crawlers such as the Google bot
A natural backlink profile usually contains each of the link types listed above. High-quality, topic-relevant content links are decisive for the search engine ranking. Nevertheless, every natural inbound link is a good link, as it allows internet users to visit your website and represents a potential traffic source. Social signals in particular offer great potential to reach new groups of visitors, especially when shared content goes viral.