How to Identify High-Quality Domains For Link Building

Paying attention to the topical relevance of the linking domain is vital. It has to be directly or indirectly connected to yours for the search engine to consider it a valid ranking signal.

Let's say you have a tech blog. Having a fellow tech blog or a gadget store refer to your website will make much more logical sense and provide more SEO benefits than a fashion blog.

Not even to mention that you might drive traffic from those topically relevant websites, as they are more likely to have a similar target audience as yours.

Search engines use the PageRank indicator and its alternatives to assess the website's authority and determine its rankings in search results.

As previously mentioned, the more, the better rule doesn't really work with backlinks. It used to but not anymore. As Google detected the PageRank manipulations through link schemes, it started considering unnatural links a violation. Not only will irrelevant, low-quality backlinks NOT improve your rankings in search results, but they may lead to a penalty.

So, the more high-quality links a webpage receives, the higher the trust.

Therefore, when considering a domain for link building, pay close attention to its domain authority and where it got its links from. Does the website get organic traffic? It's a great sign! Are there malicious websites or link farms in the website's backlink profile? Then it's not worth it.

To evaluate the quality of the potential referring domain, you should examine the content it publishes.

Are there intrusive ads? Poor grammar? Keyword stuffing? Spammy links? Sneaky redirects? Prohibited content?

If you notice those things, you shouldn't deal with such a website in any way.

These are some of the questions you should ask yourself when choosing a website for link building:

Conducting a background check for a potential backlink donor is definitely worth it, as it will help you avoid a lot of negative consequences for your website.

If the website leaves a lot of outbound links but doesn't have any backlinks, it might not be a good option for link building. Such a website will not be considered trustworthy by search engines.

There's a specialized Serpstat tool that will allow you to check any website's backlink profile:

There's also the Links Intersection report you can use to:

1. Find common referring domains for several websites.
2. Find websites that link to your competitors but not to your website.
3. Create a visual graph comparing backlink profiles of the analyzed domains.