Importance of Managing Your Link Portfolio
Categorized in: SEO
When it comes to SEO, the link portfolio has always played an important role. If you have a lot of links, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. The links need to be of a high quality, or else the link portfolio could do more harm than good. Most of us know this, but it’s all too easy to let a link portfolio sit without knowing what is going on. It is important to regularly monitor the link portfolio and take action in order to make sure everything looks good.
Managing your link portfolio is a delicate balance. Here’s a look at what needs to be done in order to make sure everything looks good:
You Can’t Actively Encourage Linking
These days, search engines frown on behaviors where they believe you are actively searching for websites to link to you. In the early days of SEO, these behaviors were abused and are no considered spamming. So, best practice is to publish high quality content and then adopt the long game, having confidence that quality content will encourage linking from quality websites over time.
If the search engines think that you are actively engaging in spammy linking behavior to help improve your link portfolio, you’ll get penalized. These days, it is much better to focus on the quality of your marketing, and not doing anything overt to encourage websites to link to you. Let them link to you if they really want, but otherwise this should be a secondary thought in your minds.
It’s About Quality Not Quantity
If you have a handful of high quality backlinks, this will be given much clout than a hundred so-so links. It will definitely be given more clout than low-quality links. Of course, a large number of quality links is the ideal situation. Most link portfolios, especially those that have been nurtured for a long time, have a mix of all three – low quality, medium quality, and high quality.
That’s why it is so much better to take the slow, long approach that we mentioned above. If you focus on the quality of your digital marketing and of your content, the quality of your link portfolio will improve over time.
Monitoring Your Link Portfolio
Although we can’t physically remove low quality links from our link portfolios, there is something we can do. First, it all begins with regularly monitoring the quality of your link portfolio. Monitoring should occur on a regular basis. We have seen link portfolios that have been neglected for yours. Things can get out of hand quickly, and once you have hundreds of spammy links in your portfolio, the damage it does on your SEO can take months or longer to reverse.
It’s so much better to keep an eye on things, and then deal with low quality links as they arise. So, how do you deal with them? You can do a process called “disavowing” through Google Search Console, which basically says to Google that you didn’t play a part in attracting these links to your website. So then, Google can maybe not count them against you.
As you can see, it is so much better to manage your link portfolio on an ongoing, regular basis.
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