One of the ways that your site is analyzed is through who links to your content. This lesson will help you understand how Google analyzes links. You'll learn how to make the most of back links. We'll also take a look at how to create natural back links, so that these don't appear spammy to Google's search algorithm. You'll learn how to ensure that your links aren't penalizing your site. Let's jump in. We know that there are many aspects of back links that Google will analyze. Google beliefs that all links should be earned naturally and not through the intent of purposefully earning or purchasing links. Unfortunately, in order to earn back links, we have to put forth some effort into doing so. The idea now is to earn links that appear as natural and non manipulative as possible. One of the ways to do this, is catering to your user base by providing an excellent user experience and creating great content. However, even with great content, some form of outreach is necessary to ensure that content is discovered by the right people willing to share and link to it. Over the years, Google's algorithm has gotten better at weeding out poor quality links and determining what links are considered good and likely earned naturally. The algorithm looks at various factors when judging the quality of a link. It's important to make sure you have a diverse back link profile that appears natural to Google. This will help you avoid any penalties that may be applied to your site through algorithms such as penguin. Google looks at many different factors when judging your site authority based on your back link profile. Some of these factors include, the amount of links your website has, the quality of those links, meaning are your links from other sites which are considered authoritative? Or are the majority of your links from new or potentially spammy sites with low authority? The relevance of the link meaning how relevant is this site linking to your site. For example, if you had a site about coffee and a site that sold coffee cups linked to you, this would be considered highly relevant. However if you had a site about coffee and a site about flower arranging linked to you, this would seem suspect. Another factor Google looks at is the placement of the link. This refers to where the link is located on the site. For example, links in the footer area or sidebar areas are generally less valuable and are also known as sidebar links which can sometimes be seen as spammy. It's important to note that these are not automatically considered bad. But there are additional things Google will look at as many times, these types of links can be considered bad links, for example; if the word partners or sponsor appear near the link, Google might consider it's a bad link, which is not good in this circumstance and you should request that the webmaster place a "no follow" code on that link. Another example, is how web design companies would often times design free templates and place a link back to their site in the footer of the template. This resulted in a large amount of links pointing back to them from irrelevant sites. Before determining whether or not the link may be spammy, It is likely they will look at your link profile as a whole as well as your link history. The best type of link to acquire is a linking content surrounded by words relevant to your site. So if we had a site about coffee and a site about coffee cups mentioned us within a blog post talking about drinking coffee, that would be considered a great link. The anchor text of a link is also important. The anchor text is known as the clickable text of a link. For example sometimes you will see "click here" as a link. Ideally, you want to have good keywords in your anchor text. So coffee site might want anchor text like coffee beans or fair trade coffee as their anchor text. However, too much keyword rich anchor text can be considered unnatural. Unnatural link profile is likely to have some anchor text mixed in with anchor text containing the brand name,words like "click here" or visit site, straight URL links. So something like www.example.com or just example, Image links,and Google will also look at things like reciprocal links to determine if you are linking back to them. As this can appear to be a link exchange making both links invalid. Because Google placed such a high importance on links for so long and has recently started to crack down on spammy and manipulative link tactics. They have created a link disavow tool which allows webmasters to discount any poor quality links point to their site and avoid a penalty. This tool is located in the Google search console and can be used to tell Google which links you do not want considered to be part of your back link profile. However, it's recommended you try and remove those links yourself before using this tool. To ensure you maintain a back link profile that appears natural, you want to edit your back links regularly. It's also important to regularly acquire new back links from authoritative sites. We have more detailed tips on creating effective offsite SEO strategies in the UC Davis SEO certification program. That completes the video portion of this lesson.
