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Note that some penalties are a result of not taking time or not knowing when to follow SEO best practices. It’s key to keep abreast of the latest Google algorithms updates for this reason.
d. The difference between good and bad backlinks
If you have spammy backlinks pointing to your website, you could get a penalty from Google. As a brokerage, you must stay on top of your backlinks or what you’ve been working for (ranking via SEO) will get squashed. Link exchanges, buying and selling links, and unnatural links are a few spammy practices that you should avoid at all costs.
Good backlinks
Why does Google mark your links as good or bad? The search engine wants to know if your content is helping readers with relevant information.
A good backlink is a useful outbound link to a trusted and approved website.
e. Explain the difference between dofollow and nofollow Links
Nofollow, used in the HTML source code, is an attribute that indicates to a search engine not to follow an outbound link that is tagged. While nofollow can prevent manual actions from Google, they can also be seen as a hint that sites are using ad-related or sponsored links.
Nofollow was introduced in 2005 to help fight comment spam, according to Google.
SEMrush’s example below of a nofollow link:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Anchor Text</a>
A dofollow link is
SEMrush’s example of a dofollow link:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Anchor Text</a>
In 2019, Google introduced two link attributes: sponsored (rel=”sponsored”) and user-generated (rel=”UGC”) links.
According to Google, “All the link attributes—sponsored, ugc, and nofollow—are treated as hints about which links to consider or exclude within our search algorithms.”
More information on new ways to identify the nature of links can be found here.
f. Backlinks tools
Ahrefs and SEMrush both have excellent backlink tools to help your brokerage with a health audit to a competitor analysis.
i. Backlink health audit
The backlink audit’s purpose is to find and disavow bad backlinks. A typical audit provides an overview and a more detailed report on the number of backlinks that lead to a website, referring domains, identifying link spikes, discovering wasted backlinks, anchor text spam, and more.
More information on backlink audits can be found here.
ii. Competitor backlink analysis
The SEMrush backlinks tool can provide you information on your competitor’s backlink strategy, including common backlinks, competitor’s best/most linked to content, referring domains (authority score), and more.
More info on competitor backlinks can be read here.
See what backlinks your competitors are using.
Collect information about your competitor’s backlinks so you can develop your own backlink strategy.
Use the SEMrush Authority Score tool to see which links your competitors have incorporated for authority and search engine optimization.