How important is a “Good Links Profile” for your Brand/Website

What is a Good Link Profile?

A good link profile is not just about the Backlinks a website/brand has on web, it is beyond that. Backlinks are just an aspect of it, and there is much more to it. Simply, the two basic features a good link profile has include:

• Good Quality/Good Authority Links
• No Spammy/Poor Quality Links

However, beyond the aforementioned points, there are a lot of factors as well, which defines a website’s Good Link Profile:

Branded Anchor Text:

The most important quality aspect of a backlink. The Brand Name/Company Name should be there as anchor text in backlinks. A typical good link profile must hold atleast 20% of branded anchor text comparing to non-branded anchor text. It could be brand-name alone or along with the seed keywords so as to give better recognition to brand and industry.

Semantic Anchor Text:

It includes using words in anchor text similar to the keyword, rather than the keyword itself. Google may return your website for query containing keyword, which is semantically related to the keywords on your website. It gets the hint through the semantically relevant anchor text in the link profile of your website.

Other than the Anchor Text, the factors, which highly influence the Link Profileinclude:

• Relevancy of linking site to the Theme and Location of your brand/website.
• Authority of linking site in terms of Age, Traffic, PR, Popularity, Reputation etc.
• Relevancy of surrounding content on linking website. The type/theme of the content and other websites/brands mentioned there.
• Freshness of links. Constant efforts should be made to get more and more fresh links to the website, which holds greater values than the old links unless they are from a very reputed website.
• Having your website mentioned along with another very popular/reputed brand in content over social media or PR sites. This is called co-citation and co-occurrence.
• Diversity of linking page, that is, use different pages of your website for linking purpose rather than just the home and profile page. Product Page, Contact Page, Blog Posts all should be used for linking your content. However, the number of links to a single page also matters.
• No paid links for the website. Mostly, the paid links are spam, plain and simple. There is always a threat of penalty if your website is found with the cheap quality paid links.

The most powerful updates of the Google in past (mainly the Penguin) were based on link profile of the websites, which resulted in complete shift in positions of websites in SERPs. So, it is always important to develop your link creation strategy based on careful study, testing and experience.

Reference Article- http://www.searchenginejournal.com/good-link-profile-get-one/104409/