A question that I see a lot in internet marketing forums is “Should I backlink my backlinks?”  The prevailing thought is that by strengthening the links pointing to you, you will make those links better, which will make your site’s rank improve.  At first glance, that sounds like a good idea, so people go and start sending links to other properties that links to their site are on, hoping to improve their ranking more (and because SEO “gurus” tell them to do it).

This logic has never made sense to me.  If a link that you build to a page that has a link to your site on it, will increase that page’s authority, why not just send that link to your own site, to improve your own site’s authority.  By getting links to your backlinks, in an effort to get more authority to the pages your backlinks are on, your site may see a little improvement, but not as much as it would by sending the links directly to your own site.

Maybe I am wrong, or not seeing the benefits, but to me, it just doesn’t make any sense. (Feel free to prove me wrong in the comments.)

The only type of proof that is out there is anecdotal proof, which are simply people’s stories “Well, I backlinked my backlinks and saw good results.”  How the hell did they measure that it was indeed the backlinks to their backlinks that caused the rankings to increase?  Since they were building backlinks to their site (since they need backlinks to backlink to), how do they know it wasn’t simply those backlinks to their site that caused the ranking increase?  Or their site aging? Or natural links they received? Or a Google shuffle?  Did they report back a few months later freaking out because their site lost the rank it had in a Google update?

All of this to say, with so many other factors involved, beyond the highly flawed anecdotal evidence, and the inability to truly test  whether your backlinks’ backlinks made the difference or not, what other proof do they have?  None.

Also, where do you stop?  If backlinking your backlinks really does help, why not backlink your backlinks’ backlinks?  And then backlink the backlinks of your backlinks’ backlinks.  If the process of backlinking your backlinks really does improve your sites rankings better than just sending the backlinks to your site, then we really should only build 1 link to our sites, and continue on down the chain, backlinking that link, then backlinking those links, then backlinking those links, on and on and on, until we are number 1.

Just get links to your site… if you send some easy social links via Amplify or other sources, to your backlinks, by all means, do that.  if you’re spending time or money on in-content links that point to your site’s backlinks, you’re just wasting your money in my opinion.

By the way, if you’re backlinking your backlinks, just to get them indexed because you have been told that your links need to be indexed for Google to count them, then stay tuned to the next post in this series that will debunk that SEO myth as well.