High-quality backlinks. What does that even mean?
Well, Google hints that links from "prominent websites" is a good sign that information is well trusted.
But that's kind of vague too.
The thing is that not all backlinks are created equal.
Some help your pages rank higher in Google, others will seem like they're doing absolutely nothing,
and some may actually hurt your rankings.
So today, we're going to talk about identifying high-quality backlinks
that will move the needle for your site.
Stay tuned.
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What's up SEOs?
Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic, research
your competitors and dominate your niche.
Now, if you're doing any kind of link building, I'm guessing you've done something like this.
First, you start with keyword research and of course you'd look at the number of links
that are pointing at the top-ranking pages.
And you see something like this and you're like…
Hot damn! Over 600 links from unique websites.
So you click on the backlinks number to see who's linking to the page.
Then you spot-check the report, and you're like…
Wow! A link from LifeHacker!
And you keep scrolling down, and then you're like…
What! A link from LifeHacker's Japanese site?
Time to learn Japanese so I can get a link there too!
So you export all results, find some email addresses, then mass-email everyone
taking whatever you can get.
This is the wrong way to approach prospecting and link building.
Without further analyzing your link prospects, you could very well be building bad links
or links that won't actually help you rank.
So what you need to do is identify your competitor's high-quality backlinks so you can know which pages
will be worth getting a link from.
And the way you're going to do that is by asking yourself a series of questions.
First, ask yourself is the site's content relevant to my niche?
Imagine this for a second.
You ask two friends for a recommendation for the best Italian restaurant in the city.
One of your friends is a chef at an upscale Italian restaurant and the other is a basketball coach
who's allergic to tomatoes.
Who's opinion would you hold higher?
Probably the chef since you know that they have experience with Italian cuisine.
In the same way, links from a website about Italian food, Italy, or recipes would hold more weight
than links from sites about technology or marketing.
For example, you'll see that this page is linking to the top-ranking URL for the query
"best running shoes."
But if you look at the content on the site, it seems more like a personal blog on random topics
rather than one on running, fitness, or any other theme.
So in terms of sitewide relevance, it's not quite there.
Now, with this one, you can probably guess that the site would be relevant based on
just the domain name.
RunEatRepeat.com.
Now, this brings up the question, what about links from sites like news publications that cover
a ton of topics, like The New York Times?
This is where you need to ask yourself:
Is the page relevant to my niche and/or the 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.
Now, if you look at the link profile of the running shoes page, you'll see that they have
a link from BusinessInsider.
And based on just the title alone, you can see that the page is entirely about running shoes.
To contrast this example, look at this link from hoover.org pointing at the same target.
The title of the post is called "An Economics Lesson For Bernie Sanders."
The post is about economics and possibly politics.
So even though they're linking to the same page,
it doesn't change the fact that the post is about economics.
Not fitness or apparel.
So in my opinion, I probably wouldn't reach out to this site for a link since the page
and website aren't topically relevant.
Now, everything that I've explained up to this point is about topical and contextual relevance.
But another thing to consider is "locational" relevance.
For example, if you're a Toronto based photographer you'd probably want to rank your pages in Toronto
and the surrounding area.
After all, that's where the bulk of your customers will likely be.
So in my opinion, I think it'd also be worth building links from websites about Toronto.
That might be from non-competing Toronto-based wedding vendors, or Toronto lifestyle blogs.
The next question to ask yourself is
Does the linking site have authority?
At Ahrefs, we try to quantify so-called "website authority"
with a metric called Domain Rating.
DR is a score on a scale from 0 to 100, which represents the overall strength of a website's
backlink profile.
And within the Backlinks report, you can see the metric beside each linking page.
For me personally, I don't really use website authority as a main metric.
Instead, I use it to gauge if these people have actually earned backlinks throughout their site.
It's also a great metric to use as an initial start for link prospecting.
For example, if I export all backlinks from this report, then I can open it in Google Sheets
and create a filter.
So I'll click on this icon here and click on Filter by condition.
Then I'll choose the "Greater than or equal to" option and then add something like 30 for the value.
And just by doing that, I was able to cut down our initial list by around 77%,
meaning a lot of backlinks from "weaker" sites.
Now, it's important to note that while this might be a good starting point, I wouldn't
recommend only reaching out to sites with a certain DR score.
You have to also keep in mind that a DR-15 site today, could continually build authority over time,
making your link on that page potentially more valuable in the future.
Alright, the next thing to ask yourself is:
Is the website getting consistent traffic from Google?
Last year, I owned a natural health blog.
And after training my team on how to get backlinks, we were building them efficiently.
And as I was looking through my link profile, I saw that we had built a link from this site.
It was from a relevant website and page, had decent website authority,
But if you look at the website's organic traffic history, you'll see a massive dip in traffic
where it went from over a hundred thousand monthly search visits to pretty much nothing.
And this was likely due to Google's August 2018 core algorithm update, nicknamed "Medic."
Now, when you see significant drop offs like this or this, it's better to stay clear.
Even outside of algorithm updates, you can't really conclude what happened with certainty.
For all you know, you may be building links on sites that had previously been penalized
for things like selling links.
And you probably wouldn't want your site to be associated with them.
So long story short, it's best to make sure that the site doesn't appear to have been penalized
or is getting steady organic traffic growth over time.
To see whether a website is getting consistent traffic from Google, you can use Ahrefs' Site Explorer.
Enter in a domain, click on the Organic search tab,
and you'll see the estimated amount of search traffic the site gets as a whole.
Next, ask yourself, does the linking page get search traffic?
Within the backlinks report, you can see whether the pages are getting search traffic.
And getting links from pages with traffic can be good for a couple of reasons.
First, you know that the page is likely still in Google's good books because if they're
getting search traffic, then they're ranking.
And second, the more traffic a linking page gets,
the better your chances of getting more referral traffic.
The next question is: are most external links on their site nofollowed?
As far as we know, links with the nofollow attribute don't pass value.
So you wouldn't want to waste time building nofollow links.
For example, let's say that you're running a guest posting campaign where you plan to link back
to one of your resources.
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.
A more reliable way to check is using Ahrefs' Site Explorer.
If you look at the main things we've talked about, it looks like the site checks all the boxes like
an authoritative domain, consistent traffic, and I'll assume the site is relevant to our niche.
Now, if we go to the Linked Domains report, we can see which websites they link out to.
And if we click on the dropdown here, you'll see that the vast majority of external links
are nofollowed, meaning your chances of getting a followed link would be slim.
So 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.
And you can see the number of external links on the page in the backlinks report in Site Explorer.
You can also click on the external links header to sort them or use Google Sheets filters
to weed them out of your prospects list.
We have a full tutorial on resource page link building,
so if you want to see how you can do that at scale, make sure to watch that video.
Now, should you only go for links that match all of the criteria that we've talked about?
I'd say no because you'd be limiting your pool of prospects a bit too much.
Instead, use these as guidelines to determine the amount of time and effort you're willing
to put into gaining links from certain pages and sites.
And also use them to find which sites you'll want to avoid building links on.
Now, if you enjoyed this video, make sure to like, share and subscribe for more actionable
SEO and marketing tutorials.
And I recommend checking out our link building playlist because I go into a ton of detail
about strategies and increasing link conversion rates.
So keep grinding away, build some high-quality backlinks, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.