WHAT IS OBL IN SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION?
If you've been involved in SEO for a while, you've probably heard of OBLs. OBLs are a way to display the total number of links on your website, but what exactly is an OBL? Why are they important? How are they to be eliminated? All of your urgent questions about OBLs and more will be addressed in this post.
WHAT IS OBL?
Outbound links, or OBLs, lead to websites other than your own.
Consider a link on your website that directs users to another website when considering OBLs. Because they can dilute your link profile and give the impression that you're trying to manipulate search rankings, OBLs are bad.
A Google penalty may result from this.
What is an internal link?
Links pointing to other pages on your own website are referred to as "internal links." They are crucial because they facilitate user navigation on your site and help establish authority for its pages.
Internal links, which are also crucial for SEO, can be used to transfer PageRank from one page to another. A portion of the link juice from the original link is transferred to a new page on your website when you link to it. We refer to this as "link equity."
Similar to giving someone money when they give you some, doing so increases their likelihood of doing so again in the future.
SEO: HOW TO REDUCE OVERALL LINK COUNT
Getting rid of low-quality links is the first step to lowering your overall link count. Utilizing a backlink audits tool like Ahrefs or Majestic is the best way to go about this. These tools will inform you of the number of "outbound links" that point away from your site and the number of "inbound links" that point to it. They might find something that surprises you.
Using the disavow tool from Google Search Console is an alternative if that doesn't work for you. This tool allows you to disavow any wrong links or domains that could affect your ranking. But only if those unfavorable links are really hurting your rankings. If they aren't directly affecting anything else.
This process is a good idea if you have the wrong links. However, it's typically not worthwhile if your only goal is to find ways to raise your rankings. Instead, concentrate on producing high-quality content and developing connections with industry influencers.
As the next step, ensure that your website is built in a way that Google approves. This entails ensuring it is responsive to mobile devices, loads quickly, and has a significant social media following. This article can help if none of those things are currently in your possession.
There's no need to worry about disavowing them if you can't find any wrong links or other problems that are affecting your site, and it isn't worth the time or effort either.
I'VE CHECKED MY OBL, NOW WHAT?
Having OBLs is not a bad thing! They have no bearing on your rankings and only cause trouble if you have a lot of them.
It is recommended that you reduce them in case you are hit by Penguin or Panda, which can happen if you have a large number of OBLs.Google will let you know how many spammy links your website has.
1. Search Console
2. Diagnostic crawl errors
3. Google Fetch
OBLs AREN'T BAD
The truth is that OBLs are beneficial and can even improve your SEO. This is why.
They serve as an authority symbol. Google will list you on their OBLs as one way to demonstrate this because they want to know that your website is reliable and authoritative in its field. It demonstrates their trust in you, which increases the likelihood that users will click on those links in the search results.
They have no effect on rankings. I've discussed this with numerous SEO consultants. Still, no one has been able to provide me with any evidence that an OBL has ever improved or adversely affected the ranking of any website.
This implies that, at least for the time being, having an OBL has no bearing on your ability to rank higher in Google's algorithm. However, the quality of your content is what really matters.
We all know link building isn't everything anymore, so please stop worrying about every little detail, like whether someone has linked to your site, because, trust me when I say, none of these things matter anymore.
As long as it has great content relevant to whatever keyword phrase people are searching for on Google, it should do well, just like any other page would, regardless of whether there was a link from another site pointing up here or not.
Therefore, if you want your blog or website to rank highly in Google's algorithm, ensure that your content is excellent. Focus on providing people with valuable content so they will click on the links in the search results and go directly to your site rather than worrying about whether or not they link back to it or if they have an OBL on their site.
HAVE MORE QUESTIONS?
WHO IS NERD NARROW?
That's it! You can do both by using our free tool to check for OBLs and taking the actions we've listed above to reduce them. We hope this blog post has clarified any misunderstandings you may have about OBLs and why they are essential to your SEO strategy.