How Many Backlinks Per Month Should I Be Adding?

Before we get into why you came here, how many backlinks per month? I think it’s important to point out at this stage, that whilst backlinks are a very big factor in your websites ranking, they are not the only factor. The content on your website is as equally important in helping you climb up those Google rankings.

First off let’s start by talking about what actually constitutes a good link. Ultimately you want them to look natural. That means you don’t want them to be too rich in anchor text, you ideally want them to come from authoritative sites that don’t look spammy or like you have just bought a load of spammy links and lastly you want them to be relevant to your business. It wouldn’t seem very natural for a bunch of gambling blogs to be linking to your hair dresser,,, unless maybe there are some good odds on someone’s new hairstyle

Let’s face I, this isn’t new information and it really just comes down to common sense. If you think it looks bad, it’s probably bad. If you are judging the link, then it’s likely certain search engines would too.

However. what about your link-building velocity? How many backlinks per month should you be building and how quickly are you meant to be building them? No need to panic I’m going to walk you through both of these questions over this article.

It doesn’t matter how many links any body else has or tells you that you need, it’s not about the quantity. The only thing you need to concern yourself with is the quality of the link. A link coming from a site like JOE, assuming its coming from a relevant section, is going to have a lot more weight to it than 5 links from some random mom blogs with a low domain rating. Essentially you need to try and build as many high-quality backlinks as you can. Even better if they are linking to internal pages on your website versus the homepage.

What’s so important about linking to the internal pages? Well generally it is easier to build links to the internal pages rather than the homepage. Have a think about it. Would you rather link from your website to someone else’s informative article that’s published on an internal page or to someone’s homepage of their business that is most likely selling something? The answer is the internal page. It’s always the internal page.

Using this tactic is going to make it hard to compete on a numbers basis alone, but it is going to give you a lot more authoritative links to your website which is definitely going to assist with outranking your competition.

Providing that all the links you are building are quality links that aren’t spammy, you generally will not need to be stressing about the velocity of your link building activity. Even if you end up building a load of links really quickly you are going to be fine. However, what I have heard being reported before is that with new sites or websites with less than 100 links being penalised for increasing their links to quickly. For instance, if you built 500 links in the first month to a brand-new website or to an existing website with a low amount of links, then you could very well notice your website rankings temporarily dropping.

It wont last long they will eventually increase to a higher position than that of their original ranking. But generally, link building too fast can seem a bit unnatural. You want it to be as natural looking as possible, I don’t know how Google’s algorithm works with link velocity, but this is just what I try to go by.
So, what I would look to do with a brand-new website or a relatively link-less old website is build 10 to 15 new inbound links in the first month. Then over the next months you can start to increase it up.

During the initial months the aim is to build links to both your homepage and your internal pages, however later on you want to move your focus entirely towards your internal pages. You want to do this because it looks more natural to have most of your links pointing to the internal pages. As we’ve previously mentioned people are less inclined to link to website homepages and as such you need to tailor your link building behaviour to what ever seems the most natural.

The above outline is really only concerned with new websites or old website where no work has been done really to date. If you happen to be in possession of an old website that has over 100 inbound links, you essentially can build as many quality links as you want every month. It’s going to be pretty hard for you to build over 50 links a month anyway.

It doesn’t just take a lot of time to increase your link building, it’s going to be pretty hard to get more than 50 new links every month, unless you have published a piece of content that’s gone viral or you are buying links, which can be a dangerous game if you don’t know what you’re doing.

If you end up running into this issue, I wouldn’t worry too much about it. It’s really unlikely that you’re going to get slapped with a Penguin penalty, that is so long as all the links you have been building are of a high quality, they’re relevant and aren’t rich in anchor text.

Worst case scenario your search traffic might plateau for a couple of months, they could even drop a smidge, but eventually you’ll see a nice quick increase in your search traffic. If you don’t get this quick increase in the traffic to your website it could mean that some of the links you have been building weren’t as high quality as you had thought, it could also mean that your content is thin. If it isn’t one of those issues, then you are going to have to add more content. That means adding more pages and writing more long form posts. You also need to look at how you are cross linking internal pages on your website. It can sometimes be a bit of work, but these are relatively easy fixes that are going to lead to an increase in website traffic. Just remember not to panic if you don’t see it shooting up straight away, it can take a bit of time.

It doesn’t matter what quality your links are, it’s still can take anywhere from three to six months for you to see any good results for your hard work. So even if you are putting in all this time into building those links, just make sure not to stop just because you aren’t seeing any big results in the first two to three months.

If you begin link building with the method above, you will probably start to see your website rank for more of the long tail terms. After a period of time and if you increase the amount of content you are publishing, you will also start to rank for head terms. Realistically most of your traffic will be generated from three to four-word search terms.

When building links to grow your website traffic, always remember that the most efficient way of building links is with content marketing. If you create quality content that contains genuinely useful information, rather than having to go around grovelling for links, you can greatly increase the chances of people linking to and just generally sharing your content.