Here’s a Great Site-quality Video from a Real Pro

Herem Moz writer and video creator, Rand Fishkin explains how you can determine the value of your site in Google eyes.

You can find the full article here.

Backlinks Can Also Determine The Quality Of Your Site To The Search Engines

With the frequent Google algorithm updates there is now a significant focus put on the quality of the backlinks to your website. What this means is you must have a quality backlink profile if you want to rank well with your site.

The old ways of building a gazillion spammy backlinks won’t work today and will likely never will work in the future. That’s good news for website owners who were doing things the right way and bad news for people who are looking for shortcuts.

With the focus now being on quality backlinks, Google developed the Disavow tool. Google realized that not every webmaster was building their own backlinks and they were unable to control who links to them. So there are situations where someone may have a large number of spammy backlinks that someone else made to their website. This could have been a black-hat service provider or even an unscrupulous competitor trying to gain an advantage. Using Google’s disavow tool in their Webmaster Tools, you can now tell Google to ignore these bad links. You must use caution as you can also disavow good links. You have to be sure that the links you want to disavow are actually bad.

Some tools that will help you do that are Majestic SEO and Site Explorer by SEO Moz. You can look up your domain in those tools and they will show you a list of backlinks pointing to your site. These are bad links and good links. It’s up to you to decide which ones are bad and disavow those. The paid versions of those services will turn up many more links, but even the free versions give you enough to get started.

The types of links you don’t want linking to your site are links for “bad neighbourhood” sites. These include sites with racist content, porn, guns, drugs, etc. Nowadays, even sites that aren’t closely related to your industry can be bad (but sometimes they are good). For example, if you own a recipe website and you get lots of backlinks from financial services sites, that could be bad for your link profile. Sometimes, it is a tricky business determining which backlinks are okay and which ones aren’t. Once you’ve found them, you put them into an excel file and use the Google Disavow tool in the Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) to tell Google to ignore those links. There is no undoing this command, once you’ve disavowed the links, Google will ignore them forever. I hope this information helps you! If you have any questions