I Was Treating Backlinks Like a Numbers Game

For some time I used the number of backlinks and referring domains as a metric for measuring success or failure. Whenever I opened my backlink report and saw an increase in the total compared to previous check I could say that I was doing well in link building. Flat growth meant that I should try something different to achieve my goals. This approach allowed me to easily track the results of my efforts even though this task seemed complicated in general.

But very often I did not analyze what was behind that neat number. I knew about sources of some links, the ones that I tried to earn in the first place. But there were many other links that I did not bother checking before, and I accepted their presence as a matter of course. At some point I got curious and started opening these pages one by one. And the nice number at the top of my report suddenly lost part of its meaning.

Some links had a reasonable explanation. They were placed on the pages devoted to the subject matter similar to my site, and I could clearly understand why someone who read that page would click on the link. Some links made no sense. I found links placed on pages that had nothing to do with my topic, links surrounded by the content which was unlikely to be read by my visitors, and some backlinks that looked impressive in the report but were quite disappointing after I looked at the corresponding pages. I was counting all of them and considering that all of them were of equal importance.

This approach changed my attitude towards checking backlinks. I stopped immediately comparing the total in the report and started opening the pages where links were placed. I paid attention to the topic of the page, position of my link on it, the context of the discussion, and was trying to figure out whether I could see any reasonable explanation for the reference apart from SEO considerations. This way took more time but provided much more information about the links which could not be easily obtained by simply looking at a graph. The links which were presented as rows in a report could have a lot of difference when you visited the pages where these links were placed.

Also I noticed that I lacked any kind of framework for making these evaluations. I had moved beyond counting links, but I still relied heavily on my instinct in order to evaluate them. And this led me to the necessity of learning more about backlink evaluation. Once I found myself reading an article on backlinksense.com, and I could see that the discussion about evaluation of individual links reflected the fact that there are several aspects worth considering, and reduction to one number may hide much of the valuable information.

What I found most surprising was how quickly this process changed my understanding of the link building process. Before that I considered new backlink as an outcome: someone put the link to my site, my total increased, and my box was checked. But now I was becoming more interested in the circumstances in which this link appeared. Is there any connection between the pages? Will the reference still make sense if search engines did not exist? Is the link placed where it can be found by a real visitor? These questions were far more valuable than the mere question about a new backlink.

Now I am not as excited about sudden growths of the total. I notice them, of course, but no longer consider them as something automatically good. Sometimes such an increase needs additional investigation rather than celebration. On the other hand, sometimes a single new backlink is worth checking because when you open the page you can understand why the author added this reference. I have not stopped tracking backlink numbers. They are still useful for observing changes and identifying the items worthy of further investigation. I just stopped considering total as the final word. Now it is usually the beginning of my analysis.

And that may be the main flaw of my approach. I needed a number that could tell me whether my backlink profile improves because I liked this idea. The web is far more complicated than this. Links appear in articles, discussions, resources, directories, profiles, and countless other places, and all these differences vanish when we reduce everything to a total on the dashboard.

These days, when my total increases, my first reaction is not "great, more backlinks." What I want to know is what has actually appeared. That small change has made my backlink reports less fun as a scoreboard but much more useful as an instrument of analysis.