The quality of a backlink plays an important role in maintaining the quality of a website’s off-page SEO. One may have heard marketers harp on the two main pillars of SEO – content and backlinks. A website which is able to optimize these two areas will be able to get a lot of organic traffic regardless of other factors.
In the early days of SEO, the quality of backlinks a website had did not matter much. Merely having a lot of backlinks was enough to get top search ranking. This led to dubious link building practices becoming the norm. SEOs at the time tried to game the Google search algorithm by using automated link building tools and getting traffic despite having poor content.
The way SEOs misused backlinks at the time has led to Google now placing immense importance on the quality of backlinks. In this article, we discuss the metrics and methods used to evaluate the quality of a backlink.
Check Metrics of the Website Itself
The first step in evaluating the quality of a backlink is checking whether the domain from which the link is coming falls within the quality parameters. These parameters convey the quality of the website and its relevance to which it is giving away the link.
Metrics like domain authority and traffic are important in understanding whether the website is worth getting a backlink from. Naturally, a website would want to get a backlink from a website with a higher domain and overall traffic number.
Another thing to check is the relevance of the website when compared to the website it is linking to. A travel website giving a backlink to a fintech blog makes little sense and reduces the overall strength of the backlink.
How Much Traffic Comes from That Link
Most SEOs don’t see backlinks as a source of traffic. However, the number of people who come to a website through a backlink is often a good indicator of its quality. For one, traffic from backlinks can mean that the link is relevant and popular amongst the audience of that website. This can be an important factor used by search engines to ascertain the quality of backlinks.
In Conclusion
In this article, we covered the metrics and methods that be used to evaluate the quality of a backlink. When building backlinks to a website, it is crucial to measure their quality as bad links can lead to search rankings falling. The methods discussed in this article can be used by SEOs across the board.
About the Author – Shyam Prasad is a SEO analyst with a solid track record of work experience with several companies. He currently works as a guest trainer at DelhiCourses.in, a well-regarded training institute for a top digital marketing training in Delhi.
