We’re super excited to announce a brand new feature in Hike – the Backlink Healthcheck. We believe that this is going to be a really important part of the platform for our users.
Want to see how it works? Then watch the video below:
What does the Backlink Healthcheck do?
This new feature helps you to identify and resolve any ‘bad backlinks’ that you have pointing to your website.
What’s a bad backlink?
Backlinks are important for SEO; if you want to gain hgher rankings you’re going to have to builds backlinks to your website.
However, not all backlinks are created equal. This means that some backlinks can actually have a negative impact on your SEO.
A bad backlink is one of these. It’s a link from a website that doesn’t help your SEO, but harms it.
I still don’t understand
A bad backlink is a link from a website that was built just for SEO value.
“Andy, aren’t all links built for SEO value?”. Kind of.
When you build a good backlink then not only does it pass SEO value, but it also helps with your brands awareness. EG a guest post helps you gain visibility to a new audience. EG a directory listing means people can find you when they a particular service or product.
However, a bad backlink doesn’t help your brands awareness as it’s been built just for SEO value, nothing else.
The website that links to you wasn’t built to provide value to it’s readers, it was built to ‘host’ backlinks; most likely to sell backlinks for money.
Examples of bad backlinks
A backlink from a website that clearly doesn’t create content for human consumption.
A backlink from a website that links to hundreds/thousands of other websites of unrelated industries.
A backlink from a website that has no social link / profiles, no comments, no ‘real’ people behind the scenes.
A backlink from a website in a language you don’t serve customers in.
A backlink from a gambling or erotic website.
And more. Use your intuition. It’s simple to spot a website that’s fake.
How does Backlink Healthcheck help?
Hike will show you all the links you have from websites that have a low SEO value (AKA ‘domain authority’).
‘Bad’ websites in most cases have a low SEO score. So we show you these.
However, not all websites that have a low SEO score are bad. That’s why Hike will show you the backlinks so you can view them and then tell Hike if you want to ‘Keep’ the link, or if it’s bad ‘Disavow’ it.
What is a disavow link?
When you identify a backlink that is harmful and that you don’t want to ‘count’ towards your website SEO, then you can ask Google to effectively ignore it by ‘disavowing’ the link.
You do this by uploading a disavow file – a file of all the linking websites you want to disavow – through Google Search Console.
Google will then ignore this backlink, but only when it next crawls the offending website page. That is why the intended results of a disavow file may not come to fruition until many months after it’s uploaded to Google.
Within Backlink Healthcheck, Hike will create your disavow file for you and you can upload it Google with one-click.
