How to Assess Backlink Quality (3 Important Factors)

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How to Assess Backlink Quality (3 Important Factors)

By Nick Zvidadze | Entrepreneur Magazine | January 24, 2023

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Websites use link-building to improve online visibility and get noticed among the fierce competition. But here’s the catch: Not all backlinks are good news. On the contrary, some can be downright bad for your online reputation in the eyes of Google.  Acquiring poor-quality backlinks from shady websites or link farms, for example, can harm your site’s ranking. Instead of helping you climb the digital ladder, they might become the reason you’re dropping in the search results.  In the worst-case scenario, if you build many low-quality backlinks, your website might even get penalized, costing you all your hard-earned rankings.  Use these tips along with other SEO techniques to start climbing up the search engine rankings fast.

1. Assess the website’s quality metrics.  When assessing backlinks, you first want to look at the website’s overall quality. Several indicators can determine how impactful a website is in the grand scheme of SEO. Here’s a quick overview:  Check the Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR).  Check the website traffic.  Confirm the website is legitimate.  And check if the website regularly sells guest posts.
2. Analyze the website’s SEO standing.  This step is essential to ensure that the backlink you’re eyeing is not just smoke and mirrors.  Some shady websites publish a ton of content about different topics to inflate their traffic and make it seem like they are a good option for link-building. In reality, they rank for hundreds or thousands of low-effort keywords, which are, most likely, irrelevant to your business.  Checking their SEO standing with an SEO tool can help you identify which keywords bring in the most traffic and whether this is relevant to your business.  A big red flag you can look out for to spot such websites is a sudden and drastic drop in website traffic. This is an indicator that something went wrong, possibly due to common SEO mistakes or even questionable SEO practices.
3. Ensure topical relevance.  Ensuring that a backlink aligns with your website’s topic is crucial for Google to tell it is natural and appropriate. If the website’s content is not relevant to your website, it’s a red flag for Google.  To maximize the impact of your backlinks, you should get them from websites in the same niche as yours or from niches that are closely related. For example, if you run a website about entrepreneurship, you want backlinks from business and startup websites. This helps build a narrative of relevance and authority. In comparison, getting a backlink from a travel website would be like mixing a business plan with a travel itinerary — they just don’t align.  In addition, you need to ensure that the specific post where the backlink is placed is also topically relevant to your business. That strengthens the backlink’s authenticity and improves its impact on your website’s SEO.

3 key takeaways from the article

1. Websites use link-building to improve online visibility and get noticed among the fierce competition. But here’s the catch: Not all backlinks are good news. On the contrary, some can be downright bad for your online reputation in the eyes of Google.  
2. Acquiring poor-quality backlinks from shady websites or link farms, for example, can harm your site’s ranking. Instead of helping you climb the digital ladder, they might become the reason you’re dropping in the search results.  In the worst-case scenario, if you build many low-quality backlinks, your website might even get penalized, costing you all your hard-earned rankings. 
3. You can get the best quality backlinks by assessing the website’s quality metrics, analyzing its SEO standing and ensuring topical relevance.

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Topics:  Marketing, Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, SEO