Simply put, backlinks are links included on other websites that point back to yours. It’s not a complicated concept to understand, but its a tricky little business trying to exploit this for your SEO.

Backlinks are a useful and viable way that most people advertising for SEO Manchester and SEO Agencies will latch onto when carrying out an SEO campaign for you.

SEO Manchester agencies have found that the more of the right type of backlinks a site has the easier it is to rank it for the keywords they need to rank on search engines. For example, if you search for SEO Manchester on Google you’ll find that the SEO agencies ranking on the first page, especially in the top 5 typically have in excess of 4000 links pointing back to their own site. Most of these links tend to come from publications related to the SEO industry as well as blogs and other articles.

In layman terms, Google’s algorithm is judging a website’s worth by looking at how many other sites are talking about it. It’s calculating this by looking at the only way it knows how – by looking at who and how many people are linking back to the site.

A good SEO backlink profile is one where most of the incoming links are high quality. What defines high-quality links is still a bit of a guessing game SEO agencies. However, there are some safe bets most SEO agencies would put money on being of high quality:

• Links from independent media – like the BBC News website
• Links from industry press – i.e. in our industry, it would be digital blogs or magazines
• Links from other websites working in the same industry – i.e. another agency linking to our site talking about how great we are (We imagine this is a quite rare occurrence).

You must now be wondering how an SEO agency in Manchester would find a way around not using poor quality backlinks and instead using high-quality backlinks.

Outside of organically trying to get the press to pick up on one of your articles you’ve submitted to them you’re in for a bit of a struggle if you try to approach backlinks in a non-manipulative fashion. So, this is where dishonest tactics typically fall into the mix of your Manchester SEO agency.

Please note: We don’t like this and we don’t participate in this type of work. See our SEO page to get an idea of how we approach good SEO with good old-fashioned high-quality web development instead of dubious SEO tactics.

Yep, you’ve guessed it, ask other blogs and industry press if they’d like some help writing good quality articles in return for a single link in the article to point at their client’s website. It seems like a nice, honest approach but blog owners have quickly become wise to this method of dubious SEO.

Instead of receiving high quality articles, they’ve found that the Manchester SEO agency who contacted them takes a few shortcuts and actually provides quite a low quality, unrelated article as their part of the deal. At the end of the day, for the SEO company, it’s not about the quality of the article content, it’s about getting that single link to their client website. In the same respect, it’s not the only article they’re writing – in order to achieve the numbers they need in order to deliver a good backlink profile they’re writing tens of these articles every month.

And finally, when one SEO company finds a sneaky method like this to get a better backlink profile they can’t keep the strategy a secret for long before all SEO agencies start copying and approaching the same blog owners with the same proposition.

Need proof? We run a number of our own websites, including The Islamic Home and The Ribbon Outlet, and each of these sites typically receives around 5 of these SEO propositions per day. We ignore them. The people answering these propositions typically tend to be lower quality blogs who are still naive to the trick.

With so many of the legitimate blog owners getting wise to the sneaky tactics used by these agencies, they closed a massive wave of opportunities to them.

So, the SEO agency way around this was to create their own artificial blogs with a goal to tricking search engines into believing they were legitimate. They even go as far as putting the domain names into other company names, putting the sites on different hosting accounts and only accessing them from different computers outside of their offices.

With a large swathe of blogs owned by the SEO company behind them they are able to bash out hundreds, if not thousands of links to their client sites without ever having to carry out any cold outreach.

How does this sound to you? Legitimate? It’s not, its far from it and to us, is a lucrative gold rush that is about to dry up very very quickly. Search engines already know about this tactic and they’re working hard at wiping out all of those websites that use them.

Why do you think that SEO agencies tell you that you’ll lose your ranking if you leave them? It’s because they’ll remove your links from their Private blog network, which in turn kills your backlink profile which then destroys your sites entire credibility online.