The importance of Backlinks in 2015
Phil’s SEO Tips
There are different factors that Google takes into consideration in order to assess a website’s value. The amount of external links pointing to that website is of course one major factor or at least it was.
The way we interact with the internet and the way webmasters create websites changes regularly. Same applies to the strategies for search engine optimization. Therefore the search engine’s algorithms change as well to make sure the user gets the best results.
Some years ago it was easy to rank a site with just a few random backlinks. Today Google is very good at identifying different kind of links and value them according to their level of authority.
Nofollow links are still and will always be less valuable than dofollow links but this is old news. The interesting new thing is that Google differentiates between blog comment links, forum signature links, article links, footer links etc.
This means that you should care less about the amount of links you generate and instead concentrate on the quality of the links you generate. It is still valid that you need a good mix of different links but the links you should strive for the most are contextual links in quality articles on an authority website.