Hey, it's Sam Oh and welcome to the third lesson in the link building module.
Today, we're going to talk about the attributes that make a backlink good or "high quality."
As I said in the last lesson, not all backlinks are created equal.
For example, if you spammed forums with links to your site, those wouldn't and shouldn't hold
more weight than let's say a link from The New York Times.
Otherwise, backlinks would just be a game of quantity and Google's search results would
reward the biggest spammers.
Fortunately, ranking on Google doesn't work that way and quality backlinks are still
a prominent ranking signal.
So with that said, let's talk about the 5 attributes that make a backlink "good."
The first attribute is relevance.
Imagine this for a second.
You're going to visit Greece for the first time next month and you need recommendations
for places worth going to.
Now, you have a friend that has lived in Greece for their entire life and obviously
knows every nook and cranny.
You also have a friend in the US who hates traveling and has never been
outside of the states.
Who's opinion would you hold higher?
Obviously your Greek friend.
In the same way, links from a website about travel or Greece would hold more weight than links from
sites about technology or marketing because they're more topically relevant and authoritative.
For example, you'll see that this page is ranking #1 for the query "how to devein shrimp."
If we look at their backlinks and also filter by one link per domain, we can see their backlinks
from different websites.
Now, if you don't have an Ahrefs account, then you can still see backlinks pointing
at pages using our free backlink checker tool, which I'll leave a link to in the description.
Going back to the backlinks report, you'll see this page from Wikihow which is called
"3 ways to peel and devein shrimp."
So the link is on a very relevant page.
Scrolling down a bit, you'll see this link from a page called "shrimp with garlic sauce"
which again is relevant at the page level.
But you can also see that it's relevant at the domain level too just by looking at their
domain name: slimpalate.com.
Both of these links are great from a relevance standpoint, whereas a link like this one isn't
very relevant at all.
The page is about Firefox 3.5, which is a web browser.
It comes from a site about video games and computer hardware.
So an ideal link would be contextually placed within the body of the content where someone
is quite literally recommending or referencing you.
Alright, the next attribute of good quality links is authoritativeness.
If you're unfamiliar with "authority" in the context of backlinks, it basically represents
the so-called "link power" a web page has.
And this relates to how Google's PageRank works.
As we discussed before, both the quantity and the quality of links matter.
So the more quality links a page gets, the more PageRank it earns.
And the more PageRank it has, the more authority it can pass to other pages through hyperlinks.
For example, let's say that page C has two links: one from page A and one from page B.
Page A is stronger than page B, and also has fewer outgoing links.
Feed this information into the PageRank algorithm, and you get the PageRank of page C.
Now, this is obviously a simplified version of how PageRank works, but the key point
here is that getting links from high-authority pages will likely have the greatest impact on
your rankings.
Now, while Google doesn't provide PageRank or website authority scores, we have two metrics
at Ahrefs that try to quantify it.
Domain Rating is our website authority metric and it represents the overall strength of
a website's backlink profile.
And URL rating is our page-level authority metric, which represents the overall strength
of a page's backlink profile.
And you'll find both of these metrics throughout most of our tools, giving
you insights on referring pages.
Now, we've covered two very important parts of good quality backlinks, but what we haven't
talked about yet is the actual link itself.
So let's break down the anatomy of a hyperlink and talk about how the different parts relate
to SEO.
Here's what a link looks like to your website visitors.
And if we look at the HTML code, then it would look like this.
Now, there are 3 basic parts to a link that matter in SEO.
The destination URL, anchor text, and the "rel" attribute or lack of one.
The destination URL is simply the URL the person will visit when the link is clicked.
The second part of a link is the anchor text.
The anchor text is the clickable word, phrase, or image attached to the link.
So in our example, Site Explorer is the anchor text, which is the name of our competitor
analysis tool.
Google uses anchor texts to better understand what a page is about and what terms it should
rank for.
But building lots of links with keyword-rich anchors is an example of a link scheme,
and may result in a Google penalty as it looks unnatural.
For example, if you had a post on the best golf balls and had a hundred links pointing
to it where the anchor texts were all "best golf balls," then it would look
and be quite unnatural.
People often use anchors such as the company's brand name, the title of the page, the URL,
or phrases like "click here."
And here's some proof.
If we look at the anchors of backlinks pointing to our data study on featured snippets, you'll
see varying anchor texts like "ahrefs," "old studies," "ahrefs study," "research," and even
specific stats like "12.3% of search queries" and "99.58%," and so on.
In fact, there are only 16 websites that have linked to us using the anchor text "featured snippet."
With most earned links, you have very little or no control over the anchor text, so
over-optimization isn't something you really need to worry about.
And the last part of the link we'll talk about is the "rel" attribute.
Some links contain a "rel" attribute, which is intended to tell crawlers about the relationship
between the linking page and the linked page.
And the three "rel" values that you should know about when it comes to link building
are nofollow, UGC, and sponsored.
Historically, nofollow links told Google that the linking page would rather not associate
themselves with the linked page.
And for that reason, Google didn't transfer "authority" through those links.
But then Google added a couple other "rel" values: UGC, which stands for user-generated content,
and sponsored, which signifies an ethical paid link.
They also announced that going forward, they would look at these link attributes as "hints,"
meaning, they may pass value through them at their discretion.
Now, if a link doesn't have any of these "rel" values, then it would be called
a "followed" link.
Meaning, the link can pass PageRank and help boost your rankings.
Seeing as this is still relatively new, I'd recommend focusing on building "followed"
links, although that's only partially within your control.
Now, it's important to note that nofollow and UGC links aren't bad.
It's just that followed links are proven to pass authority.
One final thing I want to touch on is link placement.
Prominent links are more likely to be clicked, and it's believed that Google takes this into
account when determining how much authority a link transfers.
For instance, an editorial link is more likely to be clicked than a link in the footer.
So, all else being equal, the former would be better than the latter.
So to summarize:
An ideal link would come from a relevant and authoritative page where the link is "followed."
It would have a descriptive anchor, and be placed contextually within editorial content.
But the truth is, a lot of this is out of your control.
What is in your control is how you spend your time building links.
By using these 5 attributes to help qualify prospects, or people that are worth contacting,
you'll spend your time building links that will actually move the needle.
Now, the easiest way for a beginner to start building links is to use tried and tested tactics.
And we'll be covering a few of them in the next lesson which will be published tomorrow.
So make sure to subscribe so you don't miss out on that lesson and if you're watching
this video at a later time, then check the description because all of the links
to the course will be updated there.
I'll see you in the link building tactics lesson.