November 9, 2022

Are Web 2.0 Links Good for SEO? [in 2022]

Written By

Nick Zviadadze

Founder at MintSEO

If you’re reading this article, chances are someone offered you dozens of web 2.0 backlinks for a very cheap price.

Now, you might be wondering whether that’s a good deal in the first place.

Are web 2.0 links good for SEO or are they just a waste of time and money?

In this article, we’re going to give you a definite answer!

Read on to learn:

What are Web 2.0 Links?
Do Web 2.0 Links Improve Your Website’s SEO?
Why Are Web 2.0 Backlinks So Common?
How to Identify Quality Backlinks

Let’s dive right in.

What are Web 2.0 Links?

Web 2.0 links are backlinks from self-publishing platforms or social media like Medium, Reddit, and so on. Additionally, web 2.0 links are a type of link-building tactic where you sign up on such platforms and manually create backlinks to your website.

In theory, this sounds like a solid link-building technique. You don’t have to do outreach to other website owners and build links the hard way – all you need is a virtual assistant to create dozens of web 2.0 backlinks per day!

Plus, some of these publishing platforms have very high traffic, DA, stats, and so on, so this technique must be very effective, right?

Well, not exactly…

Do Web 2.0 Links Improve Your Website’s SEO?

The short answer here is no – web 2.0 links have barely any impact on your website’s SEO for several reasons.

For starters, most social media platforms automatically tag all outgoing links as no-follow links.

This means that such links don’t carry any backlink juice whatsoever. And Reddit isn’t the only social media that does this – outgoing links from Quora, Medium, and just about any of these websites are also no-follow.

Another popular type of web 2.0 link-building technique is creating a blog on a site like WordPress (e.g. yoursite.wordpress.com) and then creating links to your website from there.

In such a case, the outgoing links are actually do-follow.

However, such blogs are created as subdomains.

Subdomains are considered to be completely different domains from the original ones. So, while WordPress.com has millions of backlinks (and a link from their site would be VERY beneficial), site.wordpress.com won’t inherit any of those links.

And of course, a backlink from a website with zero content and zero backlinks is worth absolutely nothing.

So, the effect you get here is the same if you created a fresh website and simply linked to yourself (which is effectively none).

And the final nail to the coffin? Google’s very own John Mueller has said that they consider web 2.0 links to be spam and that they don’t have any impact on your site.

How to Identify Quality Backlinks

So the verdict is in: web 2.0 backlinks simply don’t work.

This begs the question: what kind of links should you be building for your website?

The answer is relatively simple:

Real, organic links from active websites.

Here are a couple of things you can look at when deciding whether a certain backlink is good for your website:

Do-follow or no-follow. Google does not count no-follow links when evaluating backlinks. Forum backlinks and blog comment links are usually no-follow and carry no backlink juice.
Website’s topical relevance. If you get a backlink from an accounting website to your cooking website, then it won’t count for much.
Website traffic. If the site you’re getting a link from has high traffic/Google rankings, then it means that Google looks at the website favorably (and a backlink from them is more worthwhile).
Whether the site is a link farm. If a website sells backlinks, chances are, they’re a link farm (and their backlinks count for significantly less).
Location the website caters to. If you get a backlink from a popular Bulgarian blog to your website (which is that of a law firm in Boston), the link won’t count for as much.