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.
lol. I asked this question on a forum the other day! Hey I’m not gonna argue with you cos as you say there’s no real proof…but…you only have to look at some of the big sites to know that you can rank first for a search term with only one link if behind that link there are thousands of others. Surely Google is trying to downgrade all of our sites that have hundreds of week backlinked articles pointed at it so doing something counter intuitive could be a clever way forward. Just a thought.
“Surely Google is trying to downgrade all of our sites that have hundreds of week backlinked articles pointed at it”…. what gives you this impression? Sites have hundreds of weak backlinks all of the time… even weaker usually. Ever posted a link on a forum to a site or article you liked? That’s a super low quality link. You think other’s have as well? That’s a low quality link too. It’s usually not directly in content, nor is that specific forum page probably ever going to be linked to… if you operate under the assumption that Google is out to get what you’re doing, you probably won’t be as productive as you can be… my theory at least.
Thanks for weighing in!
You’re right of course, there is no conclusive proof. I don’t do it myself, but I know lots of “respected” people that do (one furry individual comes immediately to mind).
Here’s how my dull brain sees it…
The whole purpose of backlinks is to give your page more authority. I have always seen authority as juice, whether this is simply because that’s how SEO blogs refer to it or not, that’s how I picture it. Keep in mind I’m not talking about page rank here, which is similar but not exactly the same.
The way I see it, all the juice initially comes from Google. One of G’s engineers is responsible for making sure that the juice tap is turned on full pressure at all time. From Google, the juice flows out, initially, to the super authoritative sites. The pipes leading to those sites are super super fat pipes, so lots of juice is able to travel through them. The reason these pipes are so large is because of the number of links pointing to the sites.
Links are “pipe expanders”. Every link that points at a page makes the juice pipe into that page a little bigger, allowing more juice to flow through. It makes sense, then, that you want to make all the pipes to your site as large as possible, and you make them larger by pointing links at the page they originate from (or backlinking your backlinks).
Here’s the problem with this theory – pipes burst. They burst for many reasons. Maybe the site that is linking to you no longer exists, maybe it has been penalized by Google, maybe it loses it’s relevance through change of ownership, or a multitude of other reasons. Let’s say your page has 20 links pointing to it. Let’s say further that you subscribe to the theory of backlinking your backlinks. You decide to point 5 links to each backlink, giving a total of 120 links (20 to your page, and 100 to your links). If one of those 20 links breaks, you’ve automatically lost 6 links. If 5 of them break, you’ve lost 30.
For this reason, the much safer option is to point all 120 links directly at your page. Your page is safer, because it has 120 small pipes leading into it rather than just 20. If one (or 5) of those small pipes burst, it’s going to make very little difference to the amount of juice flowing into your page.
Of course, I can’t prove any of this, but who can prove anything in this game?
BTW, this page is now keyword stuffed with the word “backlink” (42 by my count)…
Good analogy…
I agree with the above but also subscribe to the view that “it probably wont hurt.” Perhaps just choosing one or two authority backlinks and backlinking those. Maybe the effort with push them up to a higher PR. So not overdoing it but being laser targeted.