The Importance of Diversity in Link Building

Link building can be a very valuable weapon in your SEO arsenal, so it is important to do it right. When you are building your links, you can make the most of your efforts by making sure that they are as diverse as possible. Diversifying your link profile will make your SEO strategy even more powerful.

Google loves a natural link profile, which is a backlink profile that includes links from many different root domains with diverse keywords – to various pages of your website. If your website has 100 links from 100 different domains, this will always be better in the eyes of Google than a website that has 100 links from only one domain.

Why is this? When a searchbot discovers that the majority of links that point to your website are coming from one website in particular – it will assume that you have an arrangement with that site and that your link profile is not natural. This might not even be the case, but having too many links from one source will make your SEO look suspicious. Once the searchbot has labelled things in this way, your chances of ranking high are very dramatically reduced.

There has been a great deal of SEO research which has revealed that search engines love websites that have a very diverse link profile. They equate this with trust and authority and they are more likely to index them.

However, link diversity doesn’t just mean getting links from different sites – it also includes many other things. So what are the factors involved in building your link diversity?

Factors to Consider When Link Building Diversity

So what are the factors that you should keep in mind when you are building links?

Links from Different Types of Websites

It is important that your link profile contains a number of links from different kinds of websites, not just the same type of site. You can accomplish this by guest blogging, commenting on other blogs, submitting to directories and much more. If you only used one type of website for your link building, such as just forums, you wouldn’t be creating a diverse profile and a search engine is likely to find that a little bit suspect.

Links from Websites with Different IP Addresses

It is also important to build links from websites with different IP addresses that are hosted on different servers. If all of your links come from the same IP address, search engines will start to become suspicious that you are using a link farm – which will really hamper your SEO efforts.

Google started paying attention to the IP address of backlinks after website owners started putting one link in the sidebar of a 1000+ page website – which would immediately get them top search engine rankings. When Google caught onto this technique of site wide links, they started to consider the IP address when analysing link diversity.

Links to Different Pages of Your Website

When you are building your link profile, make sure that all of the links don’t just go to one page of your website. Don’t just link to the homepage – link to all of the inner pages of the website as well. This is also a great opportunity to deep link, which will improve your SEO as well.

Links with Diverse Anchor Text

Another tip to remember when building link diversity is to make sure that you have a number of different anchor texts. Building links with only one anchor text is like placing all of your eggs in one basket and it is not good for your SEO. Instead, you should be targeting multiple keywords and building links with many different variations of your targeted keywords as possible.

However… Remember Relevance When Building Diversity

Of course, although your goal is to make your link profile as diverse as possible – this doesn’t mean that you should be building links from any random website. If a website isn’t tangentially related to the content of your website, you shouldn’t link to it or put a link on it. Links should be diverse, but they should also be dependent on relevance to the subject of that range.

Building a diverse link profile will be very helpful when you are improving the SEO of your website – so make sure that you have a diverse mix of links from a selection of relevant websites. It can be a little more difficult and will take some time and effort to build up – but the positive effects that it has will be worth it.