You Ask, I Answer: How to Handle SEO Backlinks With Low Authority?

In today's episode, Yoow? Joao, Yoow, asks, what should we do when you have a lot of backlinks, but most of them are with low authority. Since they are lowering our authority, should we remove them or leave them and keep trying to get new backlinks? So this is an SEO question. The short answer is it depends on the quality of the backlinks and how you got them.

If you got them using not so good means, right? You were uh you know, link spamming and stuff like that, you know, you're running a bot to pollute people's blogs, then uh not only should you remove them, but you also probably need to disavow them to say, hey, we're not we're not doing those shady practices anymore. Please um ignore the links that you know you were able to create through less than uh less than uh generally accepted means. If the links that you have that we're referring to are just you know, they're they're low authority, low quality right now, but they were obtained through normal means, you know, pitching uh websites. It doesn't, they're not gonna cause harm, right?

They're not gonna be, they're not gonna show up as something suspicious looking. They're just gonna look like low quality links. And Google has gotten really good at understanding the network graph around inbound links and deciding what is and is not relevant. So your time and effort there really is best spent on getting new stuff, getting new people to link to you. And a big part of the reason why you have a lot of low authority links is because you don't really have anything worth linking to, right?

Um, it's not the level of quality that would make um very high authority websites say, yeah, we want to we want to share that with our audience, right? We would that is what you've got there is really important. The reality is, unfortunately, a lot of content doesn't merit that. A lot of content is like, eh, it's okay, but it's not great. Um, in fact, in Google's search quality rating guidelines, uh, one of the phrases they have for uh mediocre content, uh, which I always I I find very uh informative as to their point of view, is it's called nothing wrong but nothing special.

Right. Imagine having your content described like that. Nothing wrong, but nothing special. Generating links from high authority sites is all about having something special, having something people can't get anywhere else, having something that people really want. What is that?

I mean, it can possibly be an infographic, depending on uh it or an ebook or a webinar or a video or a really long blog post or original research. There's so many tactics that you can use to create high quality content, but it has to be something special, right? One of the things that always bothers me about a lot of these these cold pitches I get from all these, you know, content creation companies is like we will create high quality, authoritative blog posts for you. You know, you look at their their output, and you're like, okay, what you and your software, and I'm pretty sure you're just using AI to generate it. What you've created is okay, but it firmly falls in the category of nothing wrong but nothing special.

There's nothing special about what these content mills are cranking out. What is special? Creating something people can't get anywhere else. Right. One of the things, for example, um before Pride Month every year, uh, I pull a whole bunch of data from the FBI's uniform Crime reporting database and uh from a few other resources and put together sort of a a state of hate crimes against the LGBTQ community.

That doesn't exist in most other places, right? That is special enough content that people in that community link to it because it's useful, it's helpful, it's informative, and it's special, it's different. Um the weekly newsletter that I put together for Trust Insights. There's fresh data of some kind every week. I call it data diaries.

And again, it's something that ideally is special. You know, the amount of hate speech used on Twitter or uh Instagram engagement for influencers, something that again, it's special, and it would merit someone on a higher authority site linking to us. So the first thing you do when you've got a lot of backlinks at a low authority is you improve your content. Make something special. And then you can go out and pitch it, and you'll probably have a lot more success pitching it because people want it.

People want special stuff, they want unique stuff, they want stuff that is new, is different, is valuable. So much of the content that we see now is it's not any of those things. 15 tips for improving your email marketing. Write an email that people want to read. Um, you know, do your deliverability protocols, send from a recognizable name, send at the same time every week.

Again, nothing wrong, but nothing special. Uh something special would be hey, try uh putting a gigantic unsubscribe button in your email at the very top so that you know people can't miss it. That is that's uh different. That's that's unique, that's special. Right.

So make special stuff. Um again, that's easier said than done. It requires thinking out of the box. It requires a client that is willing to take risks. Uh it requires creativity, true creativity to find what else somebody has generally created but doesn't exist yet otherwise in the world.

Um, you know, for example, uh on YouTube, Leo Miraccioli is this uh creator, he's a musician and he takes songs and turns them into heavy metal songs. They took took um John Denver's uh country roads and made it heavy metal, and it's it's exactly what you expect it to be. It's special, it's different. You go look at it and go, wow, that it's that is different. And then you after the couple of times of watching, like, okay, that's pretty awesome.

That's that's starting to grow on me. Um find your thing. Find a thing that only you can do. My uh my former boss and and friend Todd Deffren used to say in public relations, which has a very significant overlap with SEO. Um, there's three things you can be.

First, best or only. You know, the first is something, the best is something, or the only thing a person that does something if you want to get PR. The same is true with SEO with backlinks. First, best only. If you've got the news first, you'll get links.

If you got the best quality stuff, you'll get links. And if you're the only place to get something, you'll get links. But you've got to be at least one of those things. Ideally, two, you know, two out of three. Uh, be the first and the only at something, and that will get you the links from the higher authority sites that you want.

Good question. Thanks for asking. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.