I am referring, of course, to the already famous sponsored and UGC links that are added to the existing nofollow and dofollow links to expand (some will say) and disrupt (others will say) an already changing SEO landscape.
To talk to us about this topic, we have a specialist in the field.
Who is Juan Gonzalez Villa?
This journalist by training turned SEO consultant since 2013, is the founder and director of USEO, an SEO and SEM agency specialized in ecommerce and international projects.
Since 2016, he has been sharing what he has learned on his blog useo.es and more recently he has switched to podcast format with Reportin.
He has been a speaker at events such as SEOnthebeach and the Agency Meeting, and is also occasionally involved in training, having taught classes in the Webpositer Master's and the Marketing and Web Master's, among others.
What types of SEO links are currently best for positioning a project?
If we refer to link attributes, the best ones are undoubtedly those that are not marked with any attribute, that is, those we usually call dofollow.
Which doesn't mean that nofollow, UGC or sponsored are absolutely useless for a project.
They also have their place and use, which I explain in the following answer.
If we look at other properties of the links, such as the page where the link is located, or its anchor text, then the ideal links are those that we place on a page and a domain with topics similar to ours, provided that the page and the specific link have a minimum of authority.
It is important to specify this last point, because a page with little authority and that also has a large number of outgoing links, for example 100, will almost certainly not be passing much authority to the linked pages (since according to the PageRank algorithm, the authority that a page can pass is divided by the total number of outgoing links it contains, whether they are dofollow or nofollow).
Similarly, and always in accordance with PageRank, the authority that matters is that of the specific URL where the link is, and not so much that of the domain (which is an aggregate of all its pages).
Because if a domain has a lot of authority, but the URL that links to u philippines phone code s is many clicks away from the home page or, even worse, orphaned, and has no backlinks from other domains, that URL will have little authority to pass on.
This is something that I think many people ignore and are overly guided by domain authority metrics like DA, which are not bad as a general approximation, but they don't tell you anything about the specific URL where the link is located.
And all this, without taking into account that it is very likely that today Google uses a more advanced variety of PageRank, with a system of seed pages and a reduced link graph, according to which only the links with the shortest distances from these seeds count towards transmitting authority.
I wrote in depth about the updated PageRank patent in this post .
As for the anchor, I prefer branded anchor texts, or at least natural and diverse ones, and I don't think it's advisable to overuse "money keyword" anchor texts, as this can be a sign that we are trying to manipulate the rankings for that keyword.
What do you think is the ideal link profile? Do you believe in the often mentioned success rate or is it a myth? (% of nofollows vs. dofollows)
I think the percentage of dofollow vs. nofollow links is a sign of the health of a site's link profile.
That is, if you have 10,000 dofollow links and 0 nofollow links, this sends a signal to Google th
at your site is unnatural, and as a result, Google can put a “flag” or mark of low credibility on your site.
But I don't think there is an “ideal” percentage of nofollow and dofollow that will help you rank better.
It is rather a negative filter that you could fall into if you make the mistake of having few or no nofollow within your backlink profile.
Regarding other characteristics that the ideal link profile could have, again it is easier to define what it should not be, than what it should be.