What is High Quality Backlinks How to Check?
How does Google define high-quality backlinks? Well, Google mentions that a backlink from “a prominent website” means that the site’s content is trustworthy, but that’s kind of vague too. What it comes down to is that not all backlinks are created equal. Google considers some links to be helpful, while others appear to be doing nothing, while some may actually hurt your rankings. So let’s discuss how to identify which backlinks matter the most.
In order to determine what to rank for the top keyword term, you need to do keyword research and find the number of backlinks being pointed to the top-ranking pages. And it looks like this. If you do not analyze your link prospects properly, you may be building links that serve no real purpose for you.
In order to figure out which pages you should seek links from, you have to figure out which of your competitor’s pages have high-quality links. And how you do that is by asking yourself a series of questions. First, ask yourself if the site’s contents are relevant to my niche. For example, imagine that you asked two friends for restaurant recommendations in the city, one of whom was a chef at a high-end Italian restaurant and another, a basketball coach who unfortunately was allergic to tomatoes.
It is probably the chef’s opinion that you would hold more weight since they are knowledgeable about Italian food. Likewise, links from a website about Italian food, Italy, or recipes would hold more weight than links from a website about technology or marketing.
Topical Relevance
Going into the future Google is putting a lot of focus on topical relevance when measuring backlinks. This is the process by which search engines review the relevance of a website to a particular search query. Most search engines also consider the presence of keywords, backlinks, and the quality of the website’s content.
In the old form of SEO, content and backlinks were the primary criteria for relevance. Nowadays, relevance is based on topics and groups of topics. For example, the keyword “bicycle helmets” might not be the most relevant topic for “bicycle helmets”, but rather a specific category like “bicycle safety products” or “headgear for cyclists”. While “bike helmets” is a relevant topic for “bicycle helmets”, “bike safety gear” is not.
Now, this brings up the question of news publications like The New York Times, which cover a ton of topics. At that point, you need to ask yourself: Is the page relevant to my niche and/or the subject matter? topic of my content? The New York Times covers various broad topics across their entire site. And just because they cover everything, it doesn’t mean that links from there are worthless. In fact, the opposite could be true.
As I have explained up to this point, topical relevance is about topics and context. But geography can be a factor as well. For example, if you are a Toronto based photographer you may wish to rank throughout the entire Toronto metro area as well. That’s where your customers will probably be. So in my opinion, it’s also worthwhile to build links from Toronto-related websites. That might be from Toronto-based wedding vendors, or lifestyle blogs about Toronto.
High Domain Authority Sites for Backlinks
Do the linking sites have authority? You can use a keyword research tool to measure authority with a metric we call Domain Rating. It is a score that represents the backlink profile of a site on a scale from 0 to 100. The Backlinks report lets you see the metrics beside each link. I don’t only use website authority as a primary metric for me. Instead, I pay more attention to how many backlinks a site actually has. This metric is also a great place to start when trying to find new links.
With this approach, just by adding the 30 value for the “greater than or equal to” option, we can cut down our initial list for backlinks by around 77%, meaning sites with weak links. The important thing to remember here is while this might be a good place to start, I would not recommend only reaching out to sites with high DR scores. In addition, keep in mind that a site today which appears to be DR-15 will almost certainly acquire more authority in the near future, making your link with them more valuable.
To recap domain authority is a good metric to start when qualifying a backlink. However getting a more indepth look into the website health and link profile it critical. The main reason for checking what links are being sent to the site your looking to get a backlink is remove spammy links. You must future proof your site as much as possible. At any point Google could do an update and discount any links for any reason. You can’t totally prevent this from happening but you should keep this in mind.
Does The Website Get organic Traffic?
Inbound marketing seeks to increase organic traffic as a primary channel. Visitors that come from a search engine, such as Google or Bing, are included in this traffic. Although organic traffic is not affected by paid search or display advertising, neither is it untouched by those channels.
Alright, the next thing to ask yourself is: Is the website getting consistent traffic from Google? It could be possible that you were building connections with sites that had previously been penalized for things like selling links. You wouldn’t want your site to appear to be associated with them, so long story short you need to ensure that your site hasn’t been penalized and is receiving steady organic traffic growth over time.
Use any research tool Site Explorer. See if a website gets consistent traffic from Google. If a domain is entered into that tool, it’ll tell you how much search traffic a website gets in total. Next, consider whether the linking page gets search traffic. You can find out whether it does in the backlinks report. And get links from pages with traffic for a couple of reasons.
Google is still likely to trust this site since it is getting search traffic, meaning they are ranking. Furthermore, the more traffic a page with a link receives, the more likely you are to receive referral traffic.
Link Type Dofollow or Nofollow
Next question: are most of their links on external sites nofollowed? We know nofollow links don’t pass value; it doesn’t seem that you want to spend time building nofollow links. You can go to a web page, right-click on an external link, and then use Chrome’s “Inspect element” feature to see the HTML code of that link.
And if you see a rel=”nofollow” tag, there’s a decent chance they may nofollow a lot of other external links on their site. If you look at the main things we’ve talked about, and the site checks all the boxes like an authoritative domain, consistent traffic, and I’ll assume the site is relevant to our niche.
Unless you’re trying to get a mention from that site or to hope for referral traffic, I don’t think it would be worth the time and effort to guest-post here. Finally, ask yourself, are they linking out to too many pages? And for me, this metric plays a big role when it comes to resource page link building. When a page has a ton of external links on their page, less authority is transferred via each external link. So you probably don’t want links from pages that are linking to a thousand other pages.
How many backlinks per day are Safe?
The answer to this question isn’t straightforward and it’s relevant to the person you ask. Google wants to make sure webmasters are not trying to game the system. A search engine’s job is to provide to most accurate information to the quarry. So it’s in Google best interest to screen content, website, and link profiles.
Our readers often ask us how many backlinks they can get per day without any issues. The goal is to raise your site’s ranking as quickly as possible, so it is not unusual for you to want to know how you can achieve that. However, everyone knows that if you add too many backlinks too quickly you could get in trouble. Answering this question may not be as straightforward as it seems, thus why I am writing this article instead of simply blurting out a number!
You as a blogger can in theory build 1,000 backlinks in one day. But if this hurts your website then it only has a negative impact. The best answer to this massive question is build natural quality links. This means you can build 1 link one day and the next day build 7. Trying to race to the top or the ranking as quickly as possible. Playing the long game is how you win in SEO and with backlinks.