The "My Backlinks" feature in your Diib dashboard helps you monitor your backlinks and increase your DA.
What Are Backlinks and How Do They Help Your Site?
Backlinks are one of the building blocks of SEO. But what exactly is a backlink? Backlinks are links on other sites that point back to your site. Let’s say you sell handmade dog beds, and someone writes a blog post on their site about the best dog beds you can buy online, then links back to your site in that post…that’s a backlink.
Backlinks give Google a thumbs-up that you’re an authority on a subject (so in this case, dog beds). They help boost your site’s strength, current keyword rankings, and increase your chances to rank for higher-difficulty keywords.
You can see your current backlinks in your My Backlinks tab.
Helpful Glossary of Terms
Backlinks: Links from a page on one website to another. If someone links to your site, that means you have a backlink from them.
Spammy Backlinks: Bad-quality links that can lower your website authority/domain authority. Too many of these can increase your spam score and cause Google to penalize you.
Follow/Nofollow Ratio: Many SEO experts will tell you that you should try to maintain a natural ratio of Follow vs. Nofollow links. Some say that 70/30 is the “most” natural, but every website will have its own natural ratio. See what’s normal in your industry by comparing your website to your competitors. If you have a 99% Follow ratio and all your competitors have a 70% Follow ratio, that might look strange to Google.
Followed Links: Links that do not have a nofollow tag. These are crawled by search engines.
Nofollow Links: Links that instruct crawlers not to follow links on a particular page or specific links. Nofollow links come from websites like Wikipedia, and oftentimes forums will automatically add a Nofollow tag when you mention a URL in your post.
Anchor Text: Anchor text is the visible, clickable text of a link. In most cases, the link text tells the visitor what to expect if they click on the link. Anchor text is a component of every backlink and is an important part of SEO. Look at your anchor text, and in most cases, you will see words containing your business name and/or terms relevant to your industry.
Referring Domains: Referring domains are the total number of websites that link to your website. The ratio of the total number of backlinks to referring domains can impact how Google ranks your site. For instance, a website with 100 backlinks coming from 50 websites could have a ratio of 2 backlinks per referring domain. This can be seen as more trustworthy in the eyes of Google than a website with 1000 backlinks from 2 websites.
Source Page Title and URL: This is the title and URL of the page that is giving the backlink.
Target URL: This is the URL of the page that is receiving the backlink.
How to Use This Tool
At the top of My Backlinks, you’ll see your total number of backlinks, how many sites are actually linking to yours (referring domains), and your follow/nofollow ratio.
Below, you can see your actual backlinks (if you want to see the actual page that’s linking to you, just click on the icon next to the URL to copy it). You can also see that website’s authority, what page they’re linking to on your site, and when we first and last scanned and saw this backlink.
In the next tab over, you’ll see Anchor Text:
Here, you can see common anchor text linking to you and how many domains use that specific anchor text or keyword.
In the final tab, you’ll see your Spammy Backlinks:
You will definitely want to address these and get them disavowed because Google can penalize you if you have too many. If you’re a Pro member, join our Disavow webinar to learn how to do it yourself.
FAQs
Why do I still see spammy backlinks after I did a disavow?
Once you have provided Google with a disavow list, the backlinks you specify to Google will no longer negatively impact your website. However, since it is impossible to remove these backlinks from the offending websites, Diib will continue to find and report them to you. Just remember, once disavowed, these backlinks will no longer have a negative impact or be counted by Google even if they still physically exist.
How do I get backlinks?
You can get backlinks from a wide variety of different sources. It’s very important that you don’t buy cheap backlinks and that if you’re having someone build backlinks for your site, make sure they know what they are doing. We’ve worked with a lot of business owners that hired an SEO company to get them "hundreds" of backlinks for very little money. Search engines frown on this, and the sites often end up banned or at the very least penalized.
We recommend trying to add at least one new backlink to your site weekly. It takes about an hour a week to research websites and look at competitors’ backlinks, and another hour or so to reach out to everyone with a solid backlink proposal. For instance, if you write good content about your industry, send it to some blogs and see if they'll make you a guest publisher. If you're trying to get into directories, they have detailed directions.
Tip: Don’t be tempted to "trade" backlinks with other sites. This is considered reciprocal linking and highly discouraged by Google.