If your site is still not ranking on Google despite constantly working on and improving your SEO strategy, then you might be having some problems with your backlinks. What should you do to eliminate this issue? Adam Stetzer, president and co-founder of HubShout, offers some simple solutions on how you can address this problem.
Gather the necessary data.
The first thing you need to do, according to Adam, is to download your site’s backlinks using Google Webmaster Tools. Then, obtain reports from ahrefs.com, majestic.com, and/or moz.com. Review at least three reports from these sites to have a good cross section of links. Export the backlinks, then consolidate all the reports you have obtained from the websites mentioned above and put the data on a spreadsheet. Don’t forget to de-dupe the data to ensure that there are only unique domains or links.
Check anchor text ratio
After gathering the required data, the next step is to check your site’s anchor text ratio. Always remember that the keywords or phrases you are trying to rank on should not outweigh the branded terms. Otherwise, you have to clean them up.
Identify the number of NoFollow links
Next, determine how many NoFollow and DoFollow links there are. According to Adam, if 99% of those links are DoFollow links, your profile will look unnatural. It tells Google that you are spamming the Internet to get better search rankings. He pointed out that a healthy backlink profile should be composed of about 80% DoFollow links and 20% NoFollow links.
Check IP diversity
After ensuring that you’re not spamming the Internet with too many DoFollow links, the next step is to check the IP diversity of your backlinks. If most of the links are from domains on the same IP blocks, there’s a huge likelihood that you will be punished by Google as it tells the search giant that your site is using a link network. Adam said the IPs should be diverse. They should not be located under one server.
Ensure you’re in the right neighbourhood
In case you are using shared hosting services, make sure that your site is not hosted in the same block as spam sites. Otherwise, it can affect your site’s value and ranking. You can use Majestic.com’s neighbourhood checker to determine if you have this problem.
Determine the domain authority of linked sites
If you’re going to link to other sites, make sure their domain authority is not lower than 20. Otherwise, you should stop linking to them. To check the domain authorities of backlinked sites, you can run them on Moz.com.
