Backlinks are the links on a website or webpage pointing toward some other websites or web pages mainly through hyperlinking certain phrases termed as keywords. They play an important role in determining a website’s search engine ranking and overall authority. Quality backlinks are crucial to getting traffic on your website with the help of a relevant keyword.
They must meet specific criteria to be considered good and to pass link juice to your website. But its quality is evaluated on a spectrum, not binary. So, even if your backlink doesn’t follow all the criteria strictly, it can be a quality backlink.
Why Does The Quality Of A Backlink Matter? In the start, the quantity of backlinks was enough to rank a website, but after the updates by Google, usually named Penguin update, Panda update, etc. focus on quality over quantity. So, it has become necessary to evaluate the quality of your backlinks to ensure that you’re in the safe zone when a new update comes from Google.
The following criteria can be helpful in evaluating the quality of a backlink:
Anchor Text Relevance
Anchor text is the text that holds the link to your website, it is usually highlighted in blue and underlined. It becomes easy for Google to crawl the website and identify the link. It checks the link relevance if the destination URL is relevant to the linking text. A natural way to link a URL to your website is by choosing target keywords as the anchor text in the website content.
This can be explained by the following example: “If you have a website that offers writing tools for professionals, you must choose words like AI paragraph writer, summarizer, paraphraser, etc. as anchor text. But if you place a link in an anchor text like sports, which is irrelevant to your niche, it will be considered a low-quality backlink.”
Linking Page Content Relevance And Quality
It is important to check the content relevance and quality of the linking page as briefly discussed above. Links from high-quality content and relevant pages will bring more link juice to your website as compared to irrelevant and low-quality content. It can be understood easily that the more traffic comes to the high-quality content and if your backlink is there, there are chances that the traffic will be diverted to your website too, and vice versa.
This can be ensured by considering these parameters: if the topic of the page is directly linked to the niche of your website, and how much the page is monetized. There should not be many promotional infographics on the page that may detract the readers. Additionally, see whether the website owner genuinely wants to help visitors. It can be checked by the quality of the other pages published on the website.
Linking Domain Quality And Relevance
The relevance and quality of the linking domain are also important factors that determine how much link juice you will get and if your backlink is safe when a new update is launched by Google. If the domain that you’re getting backlinks from is irrelevant to your website, for example, you have a writing tools website, and taking backlinks from the sports domain is highly irrelevant, and can be detrimental to your website.
The domain from which you’re getting backlinks must be unique, as getting backlinks from the same domain multiple times will not be helpful enough; a new domain will bring new traffic to your website. It is also important to know that if you’re getting backlinks from multiple domains with similar dedicated IP addresses, it will highlight it as a private blog network which Google hates.
Technical Factors
There are some technical factors that also play an important role in the determination of the quality of a backlink, let’s discuss them.
Higher domain authority (DA) is considered to be good for a website. It is important to get backlinks from a website with higher domain authority even if they are less in number. The more backlinks from no domain authority are useless even if they are large in number. DA ranges from 0 to 100, where websites with a DA of more than 60 are considered excellent. The DA of a website can be checked using a DA PA checker.
Checking DA PA is good practice before getting a backlink from a website. Though Google never claimed that they give any importance or value to high DA links, but majority of SEO experts believe that Google do value and revealed API data somehow power the idea.
Domain TLD/Extension
There were times when domain extension used to matter a lot while getting backlinks from a website. TLDs like .com domain, .net domain, .org domain and .edu domain were given higher preference but now things have changed. Google has updated its algorithm a lot. In the old days it was rare to see some .cc .io .ai or any such unknown domain extension in the top 10 search results. But now you can see even .blog, .bio like domains in top results.
Same myths were popular among SEO experts about geo-specific extensions. But in a recent update by Google, it doesn’t place as much value on domain extensions that are area-specific, such as “.uk” or “.ca,” compared to global extensions like “.com.” So, you must emphasize the backlinks from the websites with global extensions instead of area-specific.
IP Address
It has been hinted before that backlinks from multiple domains hosted by the same IP address will be signaled bad for your website, Google considers it a scam. Getting backlinks from area-specific websites can also raise concerns if your website is global. So, getting backlinks from multiple domains with different IP addresses will be more helpful for you.
Link Location
There are 5 sections of a web page: header, footer, right sidebar, left sidebar, and body content. If the link is placed within the body of the content, then it can be considered safe, but if it is in any other four sections, it can be prone to changes in algorithms of Google.
The location of the link as compared to other backlinks also determines the amount of link juice passed by it. The link juice of a backlink can be calculated as the total link juice of a page divided by the number of do-follow links. Therefore, you must consider the pages with low links that raise the chances of getting more link juice passes on to your website.
Final Words
Backlinks can play a positive or negative role in ranking your website. Therefore, evaluating the quality of live links is important. There are some criteria that can be helpful in evaluating the quality of a backlink. They include anchor text relevance, linking page content and domain relevance and quality, and location of the link.
There are some technical factors that also need to be considered, such as domain authority (DA), domain TLD/extension, and IP address. When all of these factors are considered while evaluating a backlink and they are met, the backlink is expected to pass more link juice to your website.
If you’re also looking to secure a unique and memorable domain name, check out Ultahost’s domain name offerings. A great domain paired with high-quality backlinks can help elevate your website to new heights.
