The term “backlinks” or link may seem strange to those who are not familiar with SEO.

But what are backlinks?

Let’s summarize in one sentence what backlinks are so that it is understood by everyone: Backlinks are nothing but links leading from one site to another.

Why are backlinks important for SEO ?

20 years ago and more, backlinks were the only way for search engines at the time to identify new pages and include them in their results. The robot or crawler would navigate from page to page discovering new pages thanks to links.

Over the years, their usefulness has increased, as has their importance to search engines. Backlinks have thus become a kind of “vote of confidence” from one site to another. In simple terms, backlinks are one of the many factors that influence a site’s ranking in search engine results, and therefore your position in the results!

Categories of backlinks ?

There are two types of backlinks that do not have the same value:

Dofollow backlinks essentially tell the search engine crawlers in question to follow the link they found on the website, which gives them value and contributes positively to its ranking optimization. The nofollow backlinks have exactly the opposite function of dofollow and have no direct value for search engines in terms of ranking of a website.

For the record, Google’s algorithm is based on this type of model, which attempts to assign some form of value to each link or backlink in order to “understand” the popularity of each website and rank it at the corresponding position in its results.

Unfortunately, by trying to overemphasize this index, it gave rise to a form of misconception that the more backlinks to a site, the better the positions in the results on Google.

But a lot has changed since then and it’s important to be aware of a few things. In 2012, Google introduced a new filter designed to improve organic search results and identify websites that violate its guidelines. This filter is called Penguin and of course concerns links or backlinks and their evaluation:

• Quality: the sites from which it receives backlinks, the type of sites, their mutual relevance, the number of backlinks it has (at site or page level).
• Anchor text: what type of anchor word/text does the backlink contain? An over optimization of generic keywords in the anchor.
• Buying links: several networks that sold this type of link building services have been penalized.

With the emergence of Penguin, many people have seen their sites drop in Google positions or even disappear completely from Google (penalty).

And where can I see my links or backlinks?

As a rule, not all your links are displayed in Google Search Console, and specialized tools are required for a complete tracking and evaluation.

How do I get natural links back?

This is where our tool Latlas.tf comes in, if your brand is known but also your products and services. You can already study if you can put them on pages which speak about you. Sometimes it happens, that the writer of the site speaks about your mark or product that he forgets a link, worse that the url is false. Our tool is a lost link retriever