What Are Quality Backlinks And The Right Way To Identify Them

In this guide, I'll walk you through how to identify suitable sites to get backlinks from and check how many backlinks a website has. Specifically, I'll share with you the different SEO metrics to check before sending a guest post request or asking for a link insert. We'll also cover link penalties and how to identify websites you want to avoid.

There are many aspects that go into creating quality backlinks, but the majority of high-quality backlinks have three traits in common:

• Within the context of the page, the link text appears naturally
  
• The referring domain has a strong reputation
  
• The referring page is related to the link destination on a topical level
  
  

These external links demonstrate trust in your content's quality and convince search engines that your page offers useful information and should be listed accordingly in search results.
Assessing what constitutes the highest-quality backlink is an important aspect of creating a lucrative list of backlinks that will helps faster establish your website as trustworthy.

Logically, niche relevancy should be a ranking factor. In 2012, a member of the Google Search Quality Team publicly acknowledged that backlink relevance was a ranking factor.

There are three ways that Google can assess backlink relevancy. I've listed them in order of probable importance:

When all three of these factors align, you would logically get the best type of backlink. For example, a quality backlink for this post would be:

1. A backlink from Search Engine Land, Search Engine Watch, Backlinko or similar.
   
2. From an article that discusses backlinks
   
3. With the anchor text 'backlink quality'

Given this fact, one of the first things you need to do when assessing the kind of backlink you want to generate to grow your blog through guest posting or link building is to analyze relevancy. There are several tools that can do this.

One of the easiest ways to identify a large number of relevant domains to target for a link building campaign is to study the backlink profile of a competitor. Even better, the backlink profile of a leading website in your niche.

You can check a website's backlinks using Serpstat.

After reviewing the backlink profile of a competitor, you'll end up with a list of sites. You can manually study this list. To do this you just need to:

It will usually take you a couple of hours to check the backlink profile of a competitor. Alternatively, there is a bulk of backlink tools that can automatically categorize domains by niche, thus speeding up the process.

So that covers why you want to target sites in your niche, and how to quickly identify relevant domains. The next stage in assessing backlink quality is reviewing relevant SEO metrics.

One of the well-established SEO metrics that a lot of people consider when identifying sites to guest post on is Domain Authority (DA). It is a parameter used to assess how well a website will rank on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Domain Authority is ranked on a scale of 0-100. A new site will start with a DA of 0. A website like Hubspot, which gets around 4 million visitors a month, has a DA of 91. There is a similar metric called Domain Rating (DR). Like DA, the scoring is done from 0-100. The higher the score, the better the site.

Serpstat has its own internal parameter, which is known as Serpstat Domain Rank. Like the others, SDR is scored on a scale of 0-100.

A web site with a high SDR will pass on some of that trust to any website it links to. Many people call this link juice.

DA, DR, and SDR are useful to keep in mind when conducting a link building campaign.

I suggest targeting sites with a DA or DR of 30+. There are several websites you can use to check the site's DA for free. Rather than listing them out here, I suggest you run a search for "DA checker" on Google.

While DA, DR, and PR offer a quick way to see backlink quality, there are other metrics that you should consider, for example, website traffic.

The more traffic a website gets, the higher the chance that people will click on a backlink and visit your site. Google recognizes this, and that's why a backlink from a website with a lot of traffic will typically benefit your site.

In theory, a site with a high DA or DR gets a lot of traffic. However, this isn't always the case. Some websites have a high DA but have very little traffic. For this reason, it's worth checking the number of visitors a website gets before you try to get a backlink from them.

You can use Serpstat to see traffic estimates. An alternative tool you could use to check the stats of a website quickly is SimilarWeb. Keep in mind, the figure that is provided is an estimate.

Rel tags are HTML attributes that were created to help keep separate spam links from valuable citations. Google provides clear guidelines for when you should and should not use rel attributes.

The most common type of rel attribute is nofollow. A nofollow link looks a little something like this:

The nofollow attribute should be used by a webmaster to tell Google they don't want to associate your site with their content. These links won't help your content rank.

A follow link, on the other hand, has no HTML value attached to it. It looks like the example below:

The nofollow attribute should be used by a webmaster to tell Google they don't want to associate your site with their content. These links won't help your content rank.

A follow link, on the other hand, has no HTML value attached to it. It looks like the example below:

If you do think rel tags impact the quality of a backlink, then you should check what type of backlinks the site is offering. You can do this by inspecting elements on a website through your browser to check the HTML tag.

Almost everybody who runs a website is trying to build backlinks to their content. Of course, the way people get links will vary. Some will use so-called black hat methods. This includes things like buying backlinks to try and increase search rankings.

Other people will try to generate backlinks ethically. This is known as white hat SEO and includes things like guest posting.

Google tries to ensure people who use black hat techniques get penalized. The way Google manages its search results is by implementing various manuals, and automated penalties against sites they believe are gaming the system.

There are six common reasons why a site might get a Google Penalty. They are:

When you get a backlink from a site that has been penalized by Google, your search rankings are likely to drop. To avoid this issue, you need to be able to identify sites that have link penalties.

An alternative method is to use a tool to review website traffic. If there is a sudden drop in search traffic, then there's a high chance a link penalty has impacted the site. This will affect the quality of the backlink.

If you have a backlink from a website that has a link penalty you can submit a disavow through Search Console. When you do a backlink disavow, you are telling Google that you want nothing to do with the backlink.

To help you come away from this post with some actionable insights, I've created this quick checklist I run through whenever I do backlink research.

Here it is:

That's it. The checklist is pretty simple. If you follow these simple rules when conducting backlink research you will easily be able to identify quality backlinks to get for your site.

The most important thing is to analyze the quality of the backlinks after making modifications or in real time. It's easier to manually evaluate SEO data on a small website, but it's more difficult to do so on a larger one. That's why we're going to save you some time by giving you the next top 3 ideas on how to properly evaluate the backlink quality for your website:

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