Without 'backlink site level balancing' you have a hole in your backlink bucket which you can never fill

Last Update: June 5, 2022

How many backlinks should I add and where?

We can also work out the correct proportions of link weight per site level. What are we talking about?

"We keep adding relevant strong links to the home page of our website and nothing changes my Google ranking position if anything goes down"

There is an awful lot of conflicting advice when it comes to the quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to the website, but we will answer the above question.

How many are required per month?
What link strength?
High domains authority (Moz) or high trust flow (Majestic SEO)? Or both?
What anchor text to use and the degrees of how generic this should be.

However a fundamental point that is not discussed and seems to have been missed by every SEO we come into contact with is "the proportion of links that point to a website's home page (Level 1 ) and then the proportion of links that would point to various levels of the website. "

benedict.co.uk/level-two/level-three/level-4/level-5

A level is defined as the above site structure. How do we know this: what we did was to create a live test environment in which we selected 200 domains and build backlinks so that a number of sites have the exact proportion we have research and discovered, and compared it with sites where the proportion was incorrect. It took six months for all the links to be counted and for Google's link algorithm to trundle through all the sites and score them correctly.

To put this infographic on your website please copy the code below:

What we found was that the sites with the correct proportion ranks far higher that those that had an incorrect proportion, regardless of the fact the site's with the correct backlink balancing by level had far fewer backlinks of a lesser DA etc. We then compared our findings to the link profiles of 50 websites like Google to the BBC.

What we discovered was that the 'counted' link strength to a website's home page could only constitute 30% of the overall number of backlinks. The 30% is made up of the backlinks with the greatest link strength.

However if you then add another high quality backlink to your home page, the effect will be negligible as you will be simply be replacing one of your strongest backlinks.

Another finding was that building links to a six and seven level pages had zero effect on a site's Google ranking.

Sites that are only of two levels, ie a home page and other pages (eg domain.com/about.html) have the proportions divided between the two levels, 30/70 as the number has to add up to 100%.

However because of the paucity of levels or site structure the backlinks seem to be less effective as the optimal structure was not evident. This was very hard to quantify what exactly was the additional link strength of 5 levels versus 2, all we know is that the sites with 5 levels out ranked the ones with 2.

If what we do is called search engine optimisation then the stricture of a site has a far greater effect if reflected in the correct proportions of backlinks pointing to each level. Or in English if you keep building the majority of your links to your home page or to the same hub pages then your link building will never give superior results because you are simply replacing like with like!

Backlink site level balancing explained

Author: Ben Sykes

Wikipedia and no follow links, does this mean that Google discounts the most valuable resource on the internet? Food for thought. See original Google on no follow. We don't agree that no follow always means no follow!