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How to Identify a High Quality Backlink Source
There are plentiful opportunities for link building.
But, with the abundance of options for link building, you should have a careful analysis of your competition.
Besides, getting to and maintaining top rankings in search engines like Google is a challenge when your competition can easily replicate your backlink profile.
High-quality backlinks should therefore be maintained if you want to send the strongest signals that Google uses to determine the importance of your site and authority.
What is a High-Quality Backlink?
So much has been said about how powerful backlinks are in organic rankings.
SEO experts have not fallen short on showing how important high-authority backlinks are.
Factors to Keep in Mind
There are several factors to consider in determining whether a link is good or bad. But Neil Patel shared a good general principle to keep in mind in knowing whether it’s a high-quality backlink or not. The principle states:
“The harder it is to get a backlink, the more value it will likely have.”
It’s important to keep this in mind because powerful backlinks aren’t anything but easy to get.
Surely, an authority link from CNN or the White House for example would definitely boost your search rankings, but how would you get it?
Read more about backlinks from our previous post: What are Backlinks and Why Your Website Needs It
Here are the metrics on determining whether a link high-authority backlinks:
1. Web Pages Relevant to the Topic of Your Page
A powerful backlink would have relevance to your page’s topic. This means that the audience of the content of the backlink is closely related or connected to your content.
It also means that the link from a web page addresses a topic similar to your page.
The most important question to ask is if your audience will benefit from the web page you are linking to. Remember that relevance will continue to be a future trend in search ranking factors as Neil Patel stated.
Powerful backlinks are therefore those that are from web pages that are closely tied to your topic.
They are the ones that will matter the most and have a significant impact on your rankings.
Google explains this metric this way: “Links contain valuable information that can help us improve search, such as how the words within links describe the content they point at.
2.Trustworthy Sites
One very important metric to keep in mind to know if you have a high-authority backlink is the TrustRank of referring web pages.
Search experts agree that 70% of the ability of your site to get good search rankings is attributable to the sites that link to it.
Case in point: not all links are created equal.
Here’s how to find backlinks that are trustworthy:
- Links inside the content (i.e. contextual links) are the best you can ever get
- Links and anchor text that flows naturally with the surrounding content and will read naturally will not be perceived as spammy.
- Links from long-form content that are ranked higher will drive organic traffic.
- Use nofollow links to make the links look natural, authoritative, and relevant, and dofollow links to improve your rankings.
- Get a link from a site with high domain authority that carries relevance to your hosting page
- Links that follow Google’s guidelines on link attributes, for example:
- Use the sponsored attribute to identify links on your site that were created as part of advertisements, sponsorships, or other compensation agreements.
- A user-Generated Content attribute value is recommended for links within user-generated content, such as comments and forum posts
- Use nofollow links for cases where you want to link to a page but don’t want to imply any type of endorsement, including passing along ranking credit to another page.
In short, high-quality backlinks should:
- Come from high-authority pages
- Upgrade your site’s rankings and traffic
- Have a few outbound links
- Originate from relevant web pages with 100% unique content
- Come from top-quality, authoritative domains such as .edu and .gov
- Be manually placed and surrounded by 500 characters of unique text
- Make your backlink profile look natural to Google
- Increase your brand recognition and your promoted keywords’ rankings
How Do I Find High-Quality Backlink Sources?
There is a wide variety of high-authority domains where you can get high-authority backlinks to signal Google that your site has authority and value.
Related: How to Find Backlinks for Your SEO Campaign
The most well-known high-authority backlinks are from the following platforms:
- Education websites like www.nyu.edu and www.leeds.ac.uk
- Government websites like www.london.gov.uk
- Trusted .com, .net, .org, or .info domain
Education and government sites have a special value because they go through a very long bureaucratic procedure in order to register a .gov or .edu domain which will ensure its authority.
Because people go to these domains for important purposes and count on the sincerity of every page that these domains are linking to, the links and the validity of their content are very much screened.
What is the Best Backlink Checker?
An SEO expert, Brian Dean crowned Ahrefs as the best backlink checker.
He considered lots of factors including link index size, link index freshness, User Interface, feature quality, feature quantity, product updates, and value.
However, you can also consider using its close competitors which are:
- Moz Pro
- Majestic SEO
- SEMrush
You may use a combination of the different backlink checker tools in order to satisfy all of your backlink research.
A combination of two tools may satisfy the majority of your needs to make a solid home base for monitoring and managing your backlink profile, studying your competitors, and supplying your much-needed analytics and reporting.
Getting High-Quality Backlinks in 2021
High-quality backlinks will help increase your organic rankings, grow your brand, and help drive organic web and search engine traffic.
The simple and most important principle in getting high-quality backlinks is to be linked by another site that enjoys good standing with Google because some of that all-important influence will be bestowed upon your domain.
This will tell Google to boost your rank because your content is relevant, educational, authoritative, and trustworthy.
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