Is the value of your website’s backlinks dropping, affecting its SEO?
The title of this post may sound quite alarming to you if you are like many other individuals, especially if you operate a website. Do not worry; link rot happens to everyone and has done so ever since the internet first appeared. It may sound frightening, but it happens to everyone. We are going to explain link rot in detail in this blog post, along with several solutions to fix link rot.
The goal of Google’s algorithm is to gradually reduce the value of abandoned or inactive backlinks. If this condition, also known as Backlink Atrophy or Link Rot, is not addressed, it could hurt the performance of your website.
For continued SEO success, it is crucial to maintain a strong link profile.
We will discuss this issue and potential solutions below.
Table of Contents
Link Rot: What is it?
Two items constitute link rot:
- The organic breaking of links.
All links eventually become inactive. This occurs whenever website producers make updates. Eventually, the target of a link simply will not exist anymore. When a target no longer exists, the link is meaningless.
- The steady loss of link power experienced by every link.
Reduced link power results from new pages pushing older pages away from the home page. Fresh links need to be added constantly, as reducing link power is something that every link undergoes naturally over time.
More specifically: The majority of websites link to other websites to create what are known as “backlinks.” We like to refer to this as “link rot” or “backlink rot” because, over time, the websites that are connected go offline, disappear, change their names, or do other things.
Backlink rot is best described as the slow decay over time of the external and internal links that a website links to.
What to Do About Your Backlinks and Disappearing Content?
After a predetermined amount of time, disappearing or ephemeral material is deleted or archived, breaking the link and harming your SEO.
Seek out long-lasting backlinks to combat this. When content is lost, or a 404 error occurs, the URL redirects to a 301 address.
Link Reclamation: Recover Value Lost
Reclaiming your profile’s lost link power is known as link reclamation. Check your website for 404 error codes and redirect (301) to the most pertinent page to reclaim links.
If a page with a purchased backlink is removed, get in touch with the blog owner to have the page restored and the link reinstated.
Causes and remedies for Link Power Erosion
A domain’s archive sometimes has older pages buried far from the homepage, which reduces the value of older backlinks.
Build more backlinks or improve your current ones to prevent link power degradation.
Decoding Google’s Logic for Backlink Atrophy
To keep material and backlinks current and relevant, Google uses backlink atrophy. There are several causes of backlink atrophy.
- a formerly valuable connection being incorporated into a link farm.
- Google has detected fake PBN links.
- Low interaction or traffic on the connected page.
- outdated or unrelated information.
Backlink atrophy times are not specifically stated in Google patents. Some links never pass link juice or power because they are not relevant, trustworthy, or engaging enough.
Backlink atrophy is thought to start six months after a page stops receiving new links, content, traffic, or social signals in the SEO community.
The Google Search Console is just the beginning: there are many complex things going on under the hood of all search engines.
Why is link rot a problem?
Internal and external link structure is one of Google’s key SEO ranking criteria. Google’s search engine “scores” websites depending on the pages they link to both internally (such as their about us page, contact page, or blog) and externally (links from news websites or other external sites).
You need to avoid spam backlinks and ensure the Google bot only finds good-quality inbound links on your link profile.
As links begin to break down and redirect or 404 over time due to backlink rot, Google starts to take note and may or may not devalue the page where this is happening or even your entire site.
Backlink decay is generally detrimental to user experience, as well as affecting your SEO.
If you carefully examine Google’s Webmaster Guidelines, you will see that many of their suggestions closely relate to user experience (UX). For instance, Google considers “bad” content to include doorway pages, or spammy links and material, bad links, and broken links, all of which also have poor user experiences.
Fixing backlink rot
You can repair link rot without completely replacing your infrastructure, unlike wood decay in a house. The best way to deal with backlink rot is to do a full backlink audit of quality backlinks on your website. For this, there are several great SEO value tools available.
For WordPress users, there are a number of plugins you can install, such as Broken Link Checker, that will scan your site for broken links. Although this link checker is excellent, it is not faultless. You really have to know how to configure it properly.
Begin building a list after scraping your entire page and properly accounting for your backlinks. After you have completed your task list, spend some time to think about it to look for any patterns.
By tracking patterns, you may greatly simplify the work of fixing these broken links. For example, if you have a recurring domain that has a broken link on your own website, it is most likely not a broken page: it is more likely that the website is fully broken.
Protecting Against Backlink Atrophy
It is not possible to completely avoid all the backlink deterioration and atrophy, but there are a few things you can try in order to keep your backlinks fresh as far as possible without resorting to spam backlinks.
Types of Backlinks
Let us look at the different forms of backlinks and how to keep them valuable:
Citations: The Foundations of Web Authority
Citations are usually nofollow naked URL linkages that do not really send traffic or any more link juice straight to your site.
They are, nonetheless, beneficial for raising your referring domain count and improving local SEO through constant NAP listings to the linked page.
Citations might be difficult to index due to their low value and lack of unique content. Follow these actions to maximize their impact:
- For an initial spike, use Viper Tools to deliver traffic to all built citations.
- To ensure that Google crawls and indexes your citations, use an indexing tool like Omega Indexer.
- Avoid constructing tier-two backlinks and distributing social shares to citations because traffic and indexers should be sufficient.
Guest Posts: Building Relationships and Increasing Exposure
Guest posts are new articles that are published on other sites and connect to your site. They enable vigorous reverse sink-or-swim strategies to assure high relevance.
Optimizing guest posts with tools like Surfer SEO and Majestic SEO can help them rank higher in search engines and boost organic traffic. Many lead generation websites rank very highly with CTR manipulation traffic tools.
Typically, guest posts give do-follow backlinks to affiliate sites with keyword-rich anchor text, delivering significant link juice to your site when one backlinks to a new page.
Again, Viper Tools can help you a lot here. Viper tools are generally great for fine-tuning and boosting your backlink profile, restoring links to something close to their initial power.
Fine-Tuning Your Backlink Strategy Through Niche Edits
Inserting backlinks into existing blogs and articles on external domains and referring to your site are examples of niche tweaks.
While obtaining perfect relevance can be difficult, aim for industry relevance. Niche, low-quality content is not going to do much, particularly if it comes from suspicious looking websites.
You want links that fit your content, are easy to find through a search engine, and ideally come from a home page. You can rent domains, affiliate websites, or other tools to help with link building here, all without having to deal with a disavow file.
Niche edits, like guest pieces, generally give do-follow backlinks with keyword-rich anchor text, conveying significant authority to your site.
Niche edits are not the most powerful option to send traffic to your website and boost you in the rankings race, but they are better than nothing at all and can help you replace old links with one or two backlinks within your website.
Conclusion
A link audit can be a great way to find all sorts of problems, like link rot, spam links, lost backlinks, and any part of your backlink profile that no longer exists.
Because SEO is reliant on someone else’s website as well as your own, even if one backlinks only to the most relevant page on the net, you are still going to have to work to counter backlink atrophy regularly.
The best way to minimize this is to ensure you have more quality backlinks than you need and that as many as possible are permanent backlinks.
Try to keep your link-building proactive to counter link rot and the atrophy of old backlinks before you start to slip in the search results.
Scott Calland is a highly regarded content specialist with an English Degree. He has a passion for creating compelling content as a UK journalist that engages, informs, and entertains readers. With over 10 years of experience in creating news publications as a reporter, Scott has developed a keen eye for detail and a deep understanding of how to craft content that resonates with audiences. Working closely with data analysts Scott’s research on topics is unrivalled for latest news updates.
Scott is also an investor in Searcharoo.
