You’re about to read our third and final part of the research our team conducted this summer. The first two studies looked at the ranking of online stores in the Electronics niche at scale. The niche includes products such as smartphones, laptops, tablets, and other digital gadgets. Here, we are going to take a look at backlink profiles: how to work with them and correctly assess what profile you need to build for efficient promotion.

Follow the links to explore the first two studies in our research:

Who this article is for:

SEO specialists. This material narrowly focuses on helping you evaluate the backlink profiles of websites and adjust promotion strategy, if needed.

The cohort approach

In order for us to better understand what kind of backlink profile one needs to build for successful promotion, we defined 3 cohorts of websites in terms of their organic search promotion: with low success rate, moderate success rate and high success rate. In this study, we analyzed the backlink profiles of these three groups of websites.

Average DoFollow share per one Referring Domain

As you can see, though not so dramatic, the difference is there. When measured, the websites from the high-success cohort have the highest volume of DoFollow backlinks (avg.) per Referring Domain,  82%. And the moderate-success cohort shows a 75% share. This leads us to a general recommendation of maintaining the percentage of DoFollow backlinks per Referring Domain in the ballpark of 80%.

Share of DoFollow backlinks across the backlink profile

Let’s also look at the percentage of DoFollow backlinks across all the profile.  Here, the difference is even more significant than in the previous comparison: we have 69% for the low-success cohort vs 72% for the moderate-success cohort vs 79% for the high-success cohort. So we have to recommend maintaining a ratio of 80% DoFollow backlinks in your backlink profile.

Backlinks per Referring Domain

We calculated the ratio of Backlinks (total) to the number of Referring Domains. Now the difference we see here is, again, even more obvious. In the moderate-success cohort, there are approximately 50% more backlinks per one domain when compared to the low-success cohort. Meanwhile, the websites from the high-success cohort have almost four times as many as those from the low-success cohort. This indicates how important it is for your backlink profile to have sitewide backlinks deployed.

Number of Referring Domains per IP-address

We calculated the ratio of Referring Domains to the number of unique IP-addresses across our cohorts. We saw the ratio of 1.8 for the low-success cohort, and the ratio of 1.99  for the high-success cohort. This stems from the fact that the Referring Domains in the high-success cohort are more often to use the same hosting company, hence matching IP addresses.

Types of Anchors

Text

We calculated the percentage of text anchors in the total number of backlinks. The share is nearly identical in all three cohorts. The recommendation here is to make sure 85% of your anchors are text anchors.

Images

The picture here is quite similar to text anchors, with just a 2% deviation between the lowest and the highest value. The obvious recommendation here is, based on the values shown in the moderate- and high-success cohorts, to have 13% of your backlinks have image anchors.

Form and Redirect links

The share of such links is nearing an absolute zero.

Other parameters of the Backlink Profile

Backlinks deployed on websites with trusted top-level domains (TLDs) like .gov and .edu are really few, close to 0%. Those are among the most trusted TLDs, second to the big three of .com, .net and .org. Having backlinks on highly trusted TLDs (as opposed to TLDs like .site, .info, .fan and such) will have a positive effect on Google trusting your website with even just a few backlinks. Therefore, if possible, you better also pay attention to the TLDs you saturate your backlink profile with.

Conclusions

Though not that big, the differences in the analyzed parameters of the backlink profile exist. The recommendations for your backlink profile we can safely derive from the analysis are as follows:

  • Maintain the share of DoFollow backlinks in your profile at 80%;
  • Keep image anchors volume at 85% of the total;
  • Enrich your Backlink Profile with sitewide backlinks: the share of such backlinks per Referring Domain should be at 37% on average for the most successful outcome.
  • The main differences are in the number and quality of links (referring domains’ DR). As can be seen from the second part of our research, these indicators largely determine the success of the website and its search traffic volume.