Everyone who has ever stepped into the world of online marketing must have heard of the term ‘backlink’. That’s because backlinks are one of the most important elements of SEO. It is the type of backlinks your site receives that helps Google determine which ranking position among the search results you will take. However, not all backlinks are useful and helpful. There’re some that can not only ruin your reputation and your SEO, but they can also bring you some serious Google penalties. That’s why you need to take care of all the backlinks that come to your profile. But what is a backlink quality, and how to determine the value of a backlink? Well, those are questions we’re going to discuss here.
About backlinking
Once a link in a content of a website points to your site a backlink is created. At the beginning of the SEO story, the only important thing was to earn as many backlinks as possible. Back then, a huge number of backlinks was a sure way for gaining high-ranking positions on Google or some other search engine. Since the first result page is the best that can happen to one business, website owners started employing different strategies, in order to increase the quantity of the backlinks.
The problem was that most of those links were actually artificial. However, Google soon realized what was going on, and figured out techniques that will disable such manipulations. Since then the number of backlinks is not the only thing that matters. In fact, their quality became far more important.
Backlinks and search engines
Google pays a lot of attention to what it presents to its users. The information they provide needs to be reliable, the sites it shows need to be trustworthy. And, the quality of your backlinks directly influences the quality of your website too. Naturally, high-quality backlinks always come from high-quality websites. Those are, of course, the ones relevant to your topic, as well. Therefore if you want your backlinks to be effective, you need to build them carefully and smartly.
However, no site is resistant to toxic and spammy backlinks. That is why it’s important to take good care of what backlinks you receive and to get rid of the bad ones as soon as possible.
Tips on how to determine the value of a backlink
To build a strong backlink profile you need to discern how valuable a backlink is. But since this isn’t always an easy task, our team of professionals at Link Department offers you some useful factors you can always rely on.
1. Unique root domains
This refers to the internet links from a website that has never linked to your site before. In the SEO world, these links are considered very useful, but only if they’re diverse. Just for example, if numerous backlinks come to your site from only one unique root domain, that may be a warning to Google that something is wrong. That is as if you get 20 votes from only one person in a competition. No one would consider that relevant at all.
Therefore, the best thing you can do for your site’s better ranking is to get as many backlinks as you can but to make sure that most of them come from different singular root domains. That doesn’t mean you can’t take three or four from the same one, but anything more than that would be harmful.
Finally, this strategy might not be the one that brings fast results, but it’s definitely a safe one.
2. Organic traffic
Organic traffic is an excellent factor you can make some use of if you want to determine the value of a backlink. If organic traffic of the site the link comes from is good, you have to do with a high-quality backlink. Everything over 1000 organic visitors per month should be more than enough for you and your business.
The best thing here is that there are numerous useful tools that can help you estimate organic traffic with ease. Those tools are, for example, SEMrush, SimilarWeb, and Ahrefs. They base their results on the actual clicks from the visitors. What’s more, they can also show you how high sites rank with their keywords, and whether or not they reached the first result page.
3. Domain rating
Well, this one is very important. When a domain is ranking high, that means that it already has a considerable number of valuable links from the other unique sites. Logically, those with low ratings have fewer links that are related to the strong sites.
Sites with great domain ratings are the ones that Google appreciates the most. They’ve built certain authority, have diverse link profiles, and of course, all of that is followed by excellent content. Just imagine how beneficial it would be for your business to get several backlinks from such a site. If you want to reach the first page on Google, this is definitely one of the steps you need to take.
4. Spam scores
Having spammy backlinks on your profile isn’t something you should be proud of, that’s for sure. And, it is believed that high spam scores will inevitably lead you towards some serious penalties. However, things are not always so simple. Namely, most of the sites actually have a little bit of everything. There’re some medium spam scores, there’re some low ones, of course, but there must be some high spam scores too. It is almost impossible to own a website that has no spammy links at all. The good thing is, if there are only a few of them, your site won’t be in trouble.
Every new backlink brings some change in the rating position. Since their influence can be both good and bad, it’s necessary to know how to determine the value of a backlink. That’s the only way to decide whether you should keep them for good, or do your best to get rid of them.