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This is Grumpy SEO Guy, episode 134. Let's talk backlinks. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. I'm the grumpy SEO Guy and I'm sharing with you the strategies that have helped me successfully run my SEO agency for the last 14 years. In this podcast, I'll be sharing my knowledge and experience, discussing tips and strategies, and trying to help you cut through the confusion that permeates this industry. If you listen to this podcast, you will know more about SEO than night 99% of people on the planet. Ready? Let's get started. I'm the grumpy SEO Guy. Let me tell you why I'm grumpy today. I'm grumpy today because a lot of people are confused about backlinks. So in this episode, that's what we're going to talk about. But before we do that, my lawyer tells me that I have to say this right now. A quick disclaimer before we get started. Everything I say here is based on my experience and opinion from 14 years in the industry. I don't officially know how Google or any other search engines work. Everything I say here is hypothetical and based on my experience, this podcast does not constitute advice or services. Worked for me may or may not work for you. Okay, back to the show. But before you do that, some reminders. New episodes come out at 9:00am Central Standard Time on Wednesday. That's for the podcast. If you're listening on YouTube, it's gonna be a little bit after that. If you leave a comment on YouTube, I try to reply on Wednesday, but sometimes it's not until a little bit later. If you have a question, you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com if you have a complicated question and you wanna set up a zoom advisory call you can email me and we can talk about getting that arranged. If you'd like to ask questions to a group of people, you can do so on Reddit.com r grumpy SEO guy. And if you'd like to support the podcast, you could do so@patreon.com Grumpy Seoguy okay, onto the episode. So let's talk about backlinks. If you've ever studied SEO, you've probably hopefully heard about backlinks. Some people don't understand backlinks and some people don't teach backlinks. But you've probably heard the word before. And if you Listen to this podcast. You've probably heard the word before, too. So let's define backlinks. What is a backlink? Let's start by defining a link. Okay? What is a link? A link is how you get from one webpage to a different webpage, okay? So if you search for something and you click on a result and it takes you to that page, that's a link that you clicked on. If you're on a page and you click a link and it takes you somewhere else, that's a link that you clicked on. Okay? So, but what is a backlink? A backlink is a link from a website to a different website, okay? So if one website has a link and that link takes you to a different website, that's a backlink. Now, this is different from an internal link. An internal link is a link on one website to a different place on the same website. So I want to understand if it's linking to a different website, that is a backlink. If it's linking to a different place on the same website, that is an internal link. Okay, we're talking about backlinks in this episode. So now you understand what a backlink is. Let's talk about why backlinks are important. Backlinks are important because there is something that you need to rank called authority. Authority is basically a measure of the trustworthiness of a website, okay? Authority comes from backlinks, okay? The only way to get authority is from backlinks, okay? So when a website links to another website, it is sharing some of its authority with that website. The reason you need authority is because it is a measure of trustworthiness, like I said, of your website. So it's one of the ways the search engine knows which website to rank in the results. Okay? So actually, this is a good place to talk about why this is important. So there are actually four things you need to rank, and there's a lot more. I think there's like 200. But there's only four things that you really need to pay attention to. And so let's talk about these very quickly right now. So the first thing that you need to rank is don't get a penalty, okay? Do not get a penalty. A penalty is when you do something you shouldn't do. And the search engine basically either removes you from the results or it knocks your website down really far and nobody's gonna find it. So there's another episode on penalties. I'll link to it. But anyways, that's a penalty. Don't get a penalty. Number two, you need content. The quality of your content is not a ranking factor. A lot of people tell you that if you just write really good content, you will rank higher. That is not true. Search engines can tell what content is about, but they cannot tell how good it is or how helpful it is. So this is actually why they use authority. But we're going to talk about this in a minute. So you need content on your site. That's the second thing you need to rank. The third thing you need to rank is relevancy. Relevancy means what is the topic of your site? What is your website about? Search engines can tell the topic of your content, but they can't tell if it's good or not. So that's what relevancy is. And number four, you need authority. And remember, authority is a measure of trustworthiness, okay? And it only comes from backlinks. So this is a short version. We have episodes that explain these four things with a lot more detail. So I will put a link to those episodes below. But I just want you to understand those four things now. And because authority is one of those things, that's why you need backlinks. You need backlinks to get authority because you cannot rank without authority. More specifically, you cannot rank without more authority than your competition. Here's. Here's a good way to think about it. I want you to think about a weightlifting contest. Okay? How do you win a weightlifting contest? Do you win a weightlifting contest by lifting a specific amount of weight, or do you win a weightlifting contest by lifting more than your competition? You win a weightlifting competition by lifting more than your competition. So SEO is the same way. The way you get to the top of the search engines is by having more authority than your competition. Okay? That's a high level definition. We're going to leave it like that for now. I want to talk now about how authority is shared. So most of the websites on the Internet have differing levels of authority. And when they link to other websites, they share some of their authority with that other website. Okay? So if a website links to a different website, it will share some of its authority with that other website. That is how authority is shared. That is how you get authority. Most websites on the Internet have authority, and they all have a different level of authority. Some have a lot of authority, some have a little bit of authority. So if you get a backlink from a website with a little bit of authority, it's gonna share with you a little bit of authority. If you get a backlink from a website With a lot of authority, it's gonna share with you a lot of authority. Does that make sense? That's how it works. That's how backlinks share authority. Now, to be clear, there are exceptions to everything. I just keeping this, like, pretty simple for now. And to be clear, this is the only way to get authority, okay? People sometimes will. You might read things on the Internet where people are talking about how they get authority, but the only way to get authority is with backlinks. So if people are telling you something different, it's mistaken. It doesn't work that way. There's nothing you can do to your own website to create or gain authority. You can only get authority from other websites. Okay? And when you link to another website, you're sharing some of your authority with that website. Does that make sense? So the idea is that the more authority a website has, the more trustworthy the website is. That is the reason it's used to determine what your position is amongst the search results. So, anyways, I want to talk about one more thing before we keep talking about backlinks. And that is, well, this is about backlinks. It's a common misconception that it is about getting more backlinks. When people finally learn that they need backlinks to get authority, they think, oh, I just need to get as many backlinks as possible. And what they usually do is they go out and they buy backlinks. This is something we're going to talk about in a little bit. They will buy backlinks, but they're buying really bad quality backlinks that are not going to help them. Okay? Getting authority is not about how many backlinks you have. It's about the quality of those backlinks, okay? It is not about the quantity, all right? It is about how good the backlinks are. It is possible to get one backlink and get to the top of the search engines if it's a really good backlink. It is also possible to get a hundred worthless backlinks that will not help you at all. Okay? Just don't worry about what makes the difference for now. So there's actually, there's two things that I want you to take away from this episode, okay? One is that you need backlinks to get authority and you need authority to rank. And two is there is a difference between good quality backlinks and bad quality backlinks. We actually have another episode that explains the difference. It's actually two episodes because this is a really complicated topic. But just understand there's a difference. Okay? That's all you have to understand for now. If you understand there's a difference, that's the goal of this episode. Okay, so now, so now you're probably thinking, okay, I got it. I know what a backlink is. I understand why they're important and I understand how they provide authority. I understand, I understand how they share authority. This makes perfect sense. What do I have to do to get backlinks? How do I get backlinks? Backlinks. That's what we're going to talk about now. And I want to be very clear. Finding good quality backlinks is the hardest part of SEO. Okay? You are right when you think that it's not easy, because it's not. It is very hard to get good quality backlinks. There are actually four ways to get backlinks, and I'm going to tell you what they are right now. But just to be clear. So first way, do nothing and let people link to you. This is the regular advice that people give. Oh, well, just, just let people link to you. Well, here's the problem with that advice. If your position is not good, if people can't find you in the search results, they're not going to link to you because they, they don't know that you have a website. So, so telling somebody to just, you know, take it easy until somebody links to you, that, no, that's bad advice. No. And I assume you have a website and you want people to find it. Right. And you want to rank at the top of the search engine results. So waiting for people to link to you probably isn't going to accomplish that, is it? Okay. The second way to get backlinks is to buy them. Now, many search engines will tell you that buying backlinks is against their guidelines and you should not buy backlinks. I'm not telling you to buy them. I'm not telling you not to buy them. I'm just telling you people buy them sometimes before you buy backlinks. For those of you that are considering buying backlinks, I would strongly recommend that you listen to the episodes about good backlinks and bad backlinks and make sure you understand the difference. I would also encourage you to listen to the episode where we talk about why most publicly available link services are not going to help you. There's more reasons for that. We're not going to get into it now. I just want you to understand that. Three, there's something called guest posting and link outreach. Guest posting is when you write a post for someone else's website, and in exchange, they give you a link. Sometimes the link is at the bottom of the post, Sometimes it's in the middle of the post. The point is, you write content for them, they give you a link. It's a win for everybody because they get free content and you get a free link. But sometimes they make you pay for the link because they realize that's the reason that you're actually writing the post anyway. So then you have link outreach. Link outreach is pretty much the same thing, except instead of writing a post, you're finding a post or an article that already exists and you're emailing the site owner and you say, hey, your article is about this topic. We have a website about that same topic. Will you give us a link? Sometimes they say yes. Sometimes they might charge you for it. Anyways, just to be aware, that is another way to get backlinks. Now, the fourth way to get backlinks is to build your own. This is a very complicated strategy. We have three episodes that teach you how to do this. Okay. But it is very difficult. So I would recommend listening to those episodes before doing it. The short version is. And I can't even tell you how to do it because it's three episodes and I can't tell you how to do it in this episode. But the short version is this. Instead of having to ask people for links or buy links or whatever you're thinking about doing, you build your own websites and use those to link to your site. Do not try this until you listen to those episodes. Okay? Anyway, that's the other way to get backlinks. So those are the four ways to get backlinks. That's how you can do it. There's not really any other ways to get backlinks. I hope this was helpful. Post your questions in the comments below and let me know what other questions you have about backlinking. And I will do another episode and answer those questions. So let's review really quick. We talked about backlinks, what they are. We talked about why you need them. Remember, you need authority to rank. Specifically, you need more than your competition. That's how you get authority, is with backlinks. We mentioned the fact that there are good backlinks and bad backlinks, and we talked about the way to get backlinks. I hope this was helpful. Thanks for listening. Don't forget to subscribe and if you enjoy this podcast, please leave a review. It would really help the show out. I hope this episode was helpful. If you have any questions or want to suggest a subject for a future episode, you can contact me on Reddit. My username is Grumpy SEO Guy. You can visit the Grumpy SEO Guy subreddit, or you can email me@hellorumpyseoguy.com if you email me, please either whitelist my email address or check your junk folders, because I've been told that my replies are going into the junk folder, and it's probably because we're talking about things like SEO and backlinks, and I think those words will classify an email as spam. And if you want to support the podcast because it's the best source of SEO information on the planet and it's free, you can do so@patreon.com Grumpy Seoguy and I will talk to you later. You're listening to Grumpy SEO Guy, the SEO podcast that doesn't waste your time with nonsense that doesn't work. Join us next Wednesday for another episode.