If you are knowledgeable about Search Engine Optimization, you are familiar with the term ‘backlinks’ or ‘backlinking.' Backlinks which is also known as 'inbound links' plays a vital role in the breadth of Search Engine Optimization. The number of backlinks is an implication of the popularity of the website. Backlinks are essential because search engines like Google will give extra credit to websites that have a good quantity of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their search result pages.
When search engines measure the significance of a site to a keyword, they examine the number of quality inbound links to that site. Quality inbound links are the links to your site that come from other sites, and those sites should have a content relevant to your site. The higher the relevance of inbound links, the greater the quality of backlinks. While if inbound links comes from unrelated content, they are treated as less relevant. Thus, you should not concentrate on generating only incoming links; it is the quality that matters to search engines.
Also, search engines look for natural links made gradually. Inbound links made by deceitful procedures such as automatically generated pages whose only goal is to produce inbound links to websites are not only disregarded but could also put your site banned by the search engines; this is the dark side of backlinks.
If search engines speculate that your links are spammy, comes from low-quality sites, your rankings will hurt. This method is also known as ‘negative SEO.' Negative SEO is the precise antithesis of search engine optimization. The purpose is to crush your ranking and makes your website out-of-sight on search results. If your site’s rankings on Google plunged down your traffic will intensely decline.
The Solution
A website redesign is a favorable time for you to analyze your backlinks and leaving shady backlinks in place. Use Google Webmaster Tools and look for ‘manual penalty.' If 'manual penalty' appears this means Google has spotted low-quality link, then, you will have the preference to make such links as ‘no follows’ so Google will those links.
