There are lots of different backlink types that you can use to get links and popularity for your website. Some of them have been around for a long time whereas others are more recent. And yet others have been abused to the extent that you should probably avoid them if at all possible. Here are some of the best backlink types you can use.
Social media links
Sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all classed as social media because they encourage interactivity between people posting content and other people reacting to it.
There are people who seem to spend their whole life on this kind of site.
A poll conducted in 2012 showed that 56% of the people surveyed used Facebook and that figure will almost certainly be higher by the time you read this article.
Twitter has less reach but is often more influential as it gets regularly quoted by journalists.
Google follows these trends closely and takes close account of backlinks in social media.
Authority sites and page context
These fall into two categories:
Sites such as CNN and the BBC that have authority in a lot of areas
Sites that are an authority within your niche such as a trade association
Google knows both these type of sites exist and will treat them differently according to context.
This means that a backlink from a site within your trade or niche - even if it comes from a site that is theoretically less powerful - can often be given more weight than a link from a more general page.
If you have a choice of the page that your backlink is on, it's generally better to choose one that is relevant to the context of the page it's pointing to.
Position on page
Some links on a page are more important than others.
When search engine spiders were less sophisticated, links that appeared earlier in the underlying HTML were considered more important.
As a general rule, links in the main body text of the page are the best, followed by links in the side bar and finally links at the end of the page in the footer area.
Natural backlinks
The more natural a backlink is, the more valuable it is in terms of the weight it carries.
What this means in practice is that if a link is willingly placed on a page by a webmaster with no coercion or incentive from you, that link carries a higher weight than it might otherwise be assigned.
Google keeps track of links historically which means that it knows whether a site regularly or rarely links to other sites as well as the ratio of internal to external links, page position and lots of other factors.
It is able to infer from this data whether or not a link has been paid for or whether it has been placed simply because the webmaster considers it worthwhile for their readers.
Because these links are usually the hardest to get, they tend to be more valuable for you. Which can be frustrating but is likely to be an increasing factor over time.
