What makes a backlink high quality is subjective, and every SEO consultant will have at least a slightly differing opinion on the topic, however, most would agree that a good quality backlink would be comprised of several of the factors listed below, and that a backlink that ticks all of these boxes would be the perfect backlink.
It would be unrealistic to expect all of your backlinks to be perfect, and just because a backlink doesn’t meet all of these criteria it doesn’t make it low quality. If you can get a backlink to your business’s website that ticks at least a few of these boxes then it’s definitely worth having in your site’s link profile.
From a relevant source
From a trusted source
It’s logical that a high quality backlink would come from a high
quality website, and that a high quality site would also be a very
trustworthy site. To determine if a website is trustworthy, search
engines use a set of trusted seed sites (for example, Wikipedia, BBC,
The Huffington Post, etc.), which they know for sure are high quality
and which are difficult to get links from. The fewer the number of links
away a site is from one of the seed sites, the higher its TrustRank is,
and the higher the quality a link from that site is.
Sends traffic
Exact/phrase/synonym match anchor link text used
In-content
In-content backlinks (i.e. backlinks within a block of text) are the
most likely to be editorial links, which are exactly the type of links
that search engines value most, and if a link is included early on in a
piece of content then it’s natural to assume that the author of that
content considers it be an important link. Therefore, a backlink within
the main content area of a page, and towards the top of that content
area, is considered to be more high quality than a link lower down the
page or in the sidebar or footer.PageRank (PR) is the most basic and obvious measure to use when assessing the worth of a backlink – the higher the PR of the page where the link is located, the higher the quality of that link. PR can be a misleading metric though. All webpages start off with a PR of 0 (or n/a to be precise) and the PR of a page can rise and fall over time. Also, the PR value that Google displays for a page is only updated for the general public every 3 or so months, but within the algorithm it’s updated constantly. So, the PR value you see is only an estimate, and could well be a point or 2 off of the true PR.
Next to backlinks to authority websites
If a backlink to your business’s website is included on a page that
links to high quality sites, especially ones in the same niche as your
site, then it indicates to search engines that your site should be put
in the same bracket as those high quality sites. If the other links on
the page are to low quality sites, then your site won’t necessarily be
classed as low quality also, but rather search engines may opt not to
include those links as a factor, either positively or negatively, in
their ranking calculations.
From a different source to your existing backlinks
There’s a strong correlation between higher rankings for a website
and the number of unique websites (i.e. different domain names hosted on
different IP addresses) linking to that site. All else being equal,
it’s preferable to have 10 links from 10 different websites than 100
links from 3 different websites. So, for a new link to your business’s
website to be considered high quality, it should be from a website which
hasn’t already linked to you.
Not reciprocal
Link exchanges were widely abused in the past, which resulted in the
value of reciprocal links being reduced. Reciprocal links do still have
value, and there’s certainly no risk of a penalty being applied as a
consequence of them, however, if you’re looking for a backlink of the
highest possible quality, then it should come from a website that you’re
not also linking to from your own site.
Few other backlinks on the page
The trust and authority flowing through a page with a backlink to
your site on it gets divided up between all of the links on that page,
and so the less links there are on a page, the higher the quality of the
links on the page, as the the trust and authority passed on is less
diluted. It depends on a few factors, but as a rule of thumb, having a
link to your site share a page with less than 10 other external links
would be considered good.
Not easily acquired
The more easily you can acquire a backlink, the less value it will
likely have. The chances are that if you can get it a couple of minutes,
or with a couple of clicks, then thousands of people will have done it
before you and thousands more will do it after you – including your
competitors if they…
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