A “linking domain” is the main address (often where the homepage lives) of a website that has a page (or more) which links to your website.
People who are working on SEO for their website are rightly concerned with the quality of the websites that link to theirs.
For example, because we're a Diamond HubSpot Certified Agency Partner, they link to us from this page: https://www.hubspot.com/agencies/noisy-little-monkey.
Therefore the linking domain is www.hubspot.com because that is the domain that holds the page links to our website.
If there were hundreds of pages on www.hubspot.com which all linked to www.noisylittlemonkey.com it would give us hundreds of inbound links, but only from one a linking domain.
Diversity of linking domains
It makes sense to have links from a wide variety of domains to demonstrate to Google that your website is trusted by a number of different organisations.
Neighbourhood of linking domains
If you’re considering using a “Search Engine Optimisation” (SEO) company to build links for you, it’s worth remembering that the best way to get quality links from trusted websites is by having unique, fresh, well researched content. If your website is only talking about your products and services, then an SEO company is only going to be able to build links from sites that will link out without checking the quality of the web page they are linking to. These sites often link to anyone and everyone who asks, for a fee. They’re often called link farms.
We’d recommend you avoid link farms and any SEO company that recommend you use them, because:
- The value of the link that points to your site are greatly reduced because link farms contain so many outbound links
- Link farms often also link to adult websites, websites that include profane, juvenile or gross content or poorly maintained websites that may have security vulnerabilities which makes them a danger to browsers
- It’s reasonable to think that probably, Google can see all these links pointing at you and if lots of them are in a dodgy neighbourhood, then maybe your website isn’t one that should be trusted either.
You don't need an SEO company
As we say, produce unique, interesting, helpful content for your customers. Then people will link to it without needing an SEO company. Simple!
