HI Folks, Newbie here trying to get my new cannabis paraphernalia site to rank.
I have signed up for a 7 day trial with ahrefs and am stumbling through all the information that is there.
Hoping someone that has used that tool can help me jump start what to focus on first. I put in my website and then five competitor sites. I can see a list of their backlinks on the ahrefs tool, but when I click on that actual link, I end up on a forum with an article, and like affiliate links back to the target site. Is that what ahref is going to provide mostly? I was anticipating seeing long articles with keyword text in the form of URL.
I’ve never used Ahrefs, so I can’t help you there, but I can tell you not to waste your time obsessing over backlinks. Despite what you may read elsewhere on the Internet, the days when number of backliinks was the most important factor in search engine ranking have long gone; high quality content is the most important aspect now.
Links which you can place yourself are regarded as worthless by search engines, and reputable sites (like SitePoint) will mark user-submtted links nofollow, in accordance with Google’s guidelines, thus rendering them useless for SEO purposes. Creating links with the intention of manipulating search results is a violation of the search engines’ TOS, which may lead to your site being penalised: