What Kind of Backlinks Does Google Like?The types of backlinks that Google likes tends to change over time. In the beginning, links were ranked according to a strict PageRank algorithm. The more links pointing to a page, the more powerful its links. But of course, that brought up all kinds of spam issues. So Google added in different factors, such as relevance, authority, social signals and more. Today the kinds of links that Google likes are very different than the kinds of links they liked even just a few years ago.

So what kind of links does Google like today?

Links Within the Site’s Content

Google likes links that are embedded in the website’s content. People used to buy a lot of links in a blog’s blogroll. This worked really well, because that link would count as many links on that site since the blogroll generated a link on each page of the website. That technique doesn’t work nearly as well today.

By far the best kind of link now is a link inside the body content of an article. Try to avoid “author bio” or “resource box” links as well.

Real Endorsement Links

Google loves links that are actual endorsements for the other site’s content. After all, that’s what links were supposed to be about in the first place.

Google hates links that were created by the site owner or artificially generated. Links from websites like EzineArticles or Squidoo have been vastly discounted since the Google Panda and Google Penguin updates.

On the other hand, real links from real websites have drastically gone up in importance.

A Variety of Different Link Types

Having just one type of link is unnatural. For instance, if you get 1,000 backlinks from just blog comments, that’s going to look pretty strange to Google. A natural site will have Backlinks from a variety of sources. Some of those are going to be high PR backlinks, some of them are going to be low PR backlinks. That’s what Google likes to see.

Don’t just implement a single linkbuilding strategy. Your linkbuilding strategy should consist of a myriad of different strategies, each designed to get a different type of link. If Google suddenly decides to devalue one link type, you’ll still have a dozen other kinds of links backing up your rankings.

Social Factors Matter

Not everyone owns a website. Because Google tends to only look at links between websites, that can skew the search engine’s results. After all, not everyone can “vote” on the quality of a page’s content, since not everyone has a site they can use to create links. In short, backlinks are not an entirely accurate method of gauging the quality of a website’s content, from Google’s eyes.

That’s why Google is paying more and more attention to social factors like Twitter retweets and Facebook likes. Cultivate an active social media presence to boost the power of your pages and your backlinks.

These are the kinds of backlinks that Google is looking for today. It’s much more organic and much more difficult to fake than backlinks in the past. The best way to rank in today’s landscape? Build real, high quality backlinks.