Today I want to go over what a healthy backlink profile looks like and give you a better understanding of seo and link building. So here goes.

Unique IPs

In my experience, the more backlinks that are coming from unique c-class IP addresses – the less backlinks you’ll need to rank for your keywords.

Unique Domains

If your getting links from unique IPs then you’ve already got this covered. Remember, a common web spam footprint is when there is a 100 or so domains on the same IP all linking to the same sites. You want to get links from unique domains on unique IPs. I’m not saying links from the same domain or IP don’t count. I’m just saying they don’t count as much.

Unique Content

I didn’t actually do an experiment but I did observe this to be true while studying other people’s backlinks. I found one site that had a very nice link profile but didn’t have very much traffic. When I went through his backlinks I noticed a whole lot of duplicate content. I did exact match searches(using quotes) for random pieces text on his backlink pages and got as many as 10,000 results. Ducplicate content is horrible for SEO.

He also had the same domains linking to him as many as a hundred times. If you have 500,000 backlinks – you should be getting some pretty nice traffic. This guy wasn’t. Those are waters I don’t wanna test with any of my sites.

The Sites That Are Linking To You Have Links Coming To Them

Backlinks from sites that have have their own backlinks are far , far more valuable than backlinks from sites that have no backlinks.

Indexed Backlinks

If the pages with your backlinks aren’t in Google’s index – they’re probably not doing you much good. In fact, they’re probably not doing you any good. Think about it, if the page isn’t important enough to even index, how is it important enough to vouch for you. The best way to get your links indexed is to have links pointing at them.

A Little Bit Of Nofollow

At least five percent of your backlinks should be nofollow. While it IS true that nofollow links do not pass any Pagerank – it IS also true that having nothing but dofollow links pointing to your site is a common web spam footprint.

Anchor Text Variety

The backlinks pointing to your page should not have the exact same anchor text. For example: if your page is about “pretty horses” then you should also use some terms like beautiful horses, awesome horses, good page about pretty horses, etc. There should be more of the anchor texts for the keyword you want to rank for than the rest though. The idea is to make it look natural.

No Profile Spam

Many, and I mean MANY sites have been banned from Google for profile spamming. I have seen high ranking sites with profile spam pointing at their site. But they also had a lot of good links too. Simply put – profile spam is not worth the risk. Especially if you care about your site.

Conclusion

These are some of the most critical aspects of off-page seo. I didn’t cover every little thing but these are definitely the most important. If you have any questions or anything to add – just ask or add in the comment section.