If you want your website to rank higher, you should regularly perform backlink quality analysis. Since backlink quality analysis is a long process, you must plan it strategically. When evaluating your backlink profile, you must ensure that the links pointing to your website are relevant. Other metrics to evaluate include but are not limited to DA, PA, and DR. By evaluating the quality and volume of the backlinks pointing to your website, you can determine the best strategy to improve your website’s backlink profile.
Backlink Quality Analysis – Why Does It Matter?
You need to perform backlink quality analysis because your website needs backlinks. Now, if you are wondering why your website needs backlinks, you should know that you need backlinks to improve your website’s rankings and to boost discoverability. Backlinks are Google’s top-ranking factor, as Google views each backlink as a vote of confidence.
Whenever one website links to another, it essentially acts as a sign that the content is valuable. Apart from ranking juice, high-quality backlinks make a website more discoverable by boosting the value of referral traffic.
The Purpose of Backlink Quality Analysis
The primary purpose of backlink quality analysis is to assess how the backlinks of a website impact the website’s search engine ranking and what you can do to improve your backlink profile enormously. Understandably, backlinks are a crucial aspect of SEO, as these play a key role in boosting your website’s search ranking position and visibility.
What Makes High-Quality Backlinks?
A backlink is high quality when it is valuable and relevant enough to act as a vote of confidence from one website to another website. Google does so much more than counting the number of backlinks to your website. Google algorithm actually evaluates the backlinks using a quality scale from low to high. Low-quality backlinks will be irrelevant and reflect spammy link-building practices. On the other hand, medium-quality backlinks are being linked from “good enough” but non-authority sources.
However, when it comes to high-quality backlinks, these are links coming from highly authoritative, relevant, and reliable domains.
How to Check Backlink Quality – Essential Steps
When you check quality of backlinks, you need to know how to assess the backlink profile of your website correctly. Your website can have backlinks from many sources, which is why it is incredibly important to analyze all backlinks from time to time. You will realize that some of these backlinks are not as high-quality as you might have believed.
Also, if your website domain is old, there is a high chance that your backlink profile comprises more low-quality backlinks than mediocre and high-quality backlinks. On that note, you must carefully plan your backlink quality check so that you won’t miss out on quality as well as value.
Step #1: Use Backlinks Data Sources to Assess Referring Domains
If you have a large website, it means that you have loads of backlinks, which is why you must assess as many referring root domains as possible. In other words, you should get backlinks from different referring domains instead of getting loads of links from the same domain. The focus is on diversity for a high-quality backlink profile. The higher the number of different referring domains, the higher your website’s chances of ranking higher in Google.
Leverage SEO Tools for A Comprehensive Backlink Audit
Luckily, you can leverage various SEO tools for a detailed backlink audit. As a matter of fact, we recommend combining different backlink tools if you have had your website for a long time now and have collected a large number of backlinks over time. Make sure to use tools that get you all the data you need to perform a comprehensive backlink quality analysis.
Maintain a clean backlink profile and remove all referring domains that are 404, along with the domains that don’t comprise indexed pages. While you are at it, make sure to identify negative SEO techniques that can get you penalized by Google.
Step #2: Asses the Domain Authority of the Root Domains
The next step is to assess the domain authority of the linking root domains. As a general rule of thumb, you must keep in mind that the higher the DA will be, the better it is for your backlink profile. However, it is incredibly important for your website to have a natural distribution of high-authority and low-authority domains.
This aspect indicates that it is perfectly fine to have a smaller number of referring domains that are highly authoritative than a large number of domains that have no authority or impact on your website’s ranking aspect. When it comes to high-quality backlinks, both metrics PA and DA are important in terms of link influence.
Step #3: Make Sure The Anchor Texts Are Optimized
Optimizing anchor texts is part of link building quality control. What this means is that you must check your anchor texts, verify them, and ensure that each of them is classified as commercial, brand, or other. By optimizing the anchor texts of your website, you will have a better backlink profile that comprises high-quality backlinks. To make the entire process of anchor text assessment easier, you should focus on creating high-quality content.
By doing so, you will naturally improve the process of getting naturally-fitting and good-quality anchor texts. You might want to follow the below-given steps for effective anchor text optimization:
- Use natural and descriptive language
- Avoid the over-use of exact-match anchor texts
- Link to authoritative sites for external anchor texts
- Improve the text that surrounds the anchors
- Use your brand’s name in the form of anchor texts
Step #4: Perform an In-Depth Backlink Analysis
After optimizing the anchor texts, your next step is to assess the naturalness of the linking site. The only right way to do this is by performing an in-depth backlink analysis. In other words, you must perform an on-page analysis for each backlink. You must review each of the linking pages while using the following metrics:
- Assess the naturalness of each link and categorize them as natural, unnatural, or suspect links.
- Assess the position of the links.
- Assess whether the text is a text, redirect link, or image.
- Determine the status of the link and see whether it is live or lost.
- Determine the type of page the link is on, such as a forum thread, blog post, or blog comment.
- Assess the position of the links in terms of content or a group of links.
- Assess the HTTPS status of the linking page.
- Determine whether the link is a homepage link or whether it is deep.
You can leverage great SEO tools to perform an in-depth backlinks analysis and deeply assess the quality of the backlinks. For instance, a bad-quality backlink would be where the backlink is positioned on a list of links that are essentially popping ads. These types of links can damage your website to the point of dropping your website’s ranking. To prevent your website from losing its ranking, it is in your best interest to perform an in-depth backlinks audit so that you can disavow any backlinks that are harming your website’s health.
While performing an in-depth backlink analysis, you must double-check the HTTPS status code of the backlinks so that you can detect broken pages, which can decrease the link juice and harm your website’s health.
Step #5: Determine the Social Component of the Backlinks
When it comes to effective backlink quality analysis, you must also assess the social component of the backlinks. What this means is that you must check whether the webpage that has backlinks has actual shares in social media or whether it actually has a social media engagement. The focus is to ensure that the backlinks have an overall image in the public domain.
Social engagement and social shares are two important aspects of social metrics when it comes to backlinks. Social media users who like and share the links can actually become viewers of your website and ultimately become valuable prospects, in which case, such backlinks are absolutely worth keeping.
You might want to understand the importance of social media shares as a way to boost your website traffic. This aspect, in turn, can boost the conversion rate.
Backlink Quality Check – The Benefits
Here are the top benefits of backlink quality checks.
Affect Multiple SEO Ranking Factors
Quality backlinks make an impact on several SEO ranking factors, which is why quality backlinks are essential for your link-building campaign. However, to attract high-quality backlinks, you must create high-quality content. Subsequently, the quality of content can provide you with valuable insights, brand searches, social sharing, customer engagement, etc.
Boost Website Traffic
High-quality backlinks can also affect your website traffic. You can write popular blogs as a way to boost your daily traffic. Subsequently, you can earn high-quality backlinks. More website traffic also boosts the conversion rate, and you get new potential customers. It is important to mention here that the boost in website traffic might die after a few days – however – the backlink will remain, and internet users will continue reading your blog.
So, by earning high-quality backlinks regularly, you can boost your website traffic every day.
Attract High-Quality Backlinks
Suppose you write a blog post that gets good coverage and earns you a backlink from a news outlet. What happens then is that you increase your chances of getting “extra” backlinks. We are referring to the backlinks that you can secure from other bloggers, journalists, or subject experts. These different niche experts might be referring to your content and also give you a backlink.
To attract more high-quality backlinks, you must ensure that you have high-quality content, as your high-quality content can soon turn into a cascade of extra backlinks that will not only spread your message but boost your website traffic, too.
We recommend building a positive relationship with all potential publishers, as it is a crucial part of effective link-building. The point is that additional backlinks are great for your website’s SEO.
Earn People’s Trust in Your Brand
High-quality backlinks will help you earn people’s trust in your brand. As you get high-quality backlinks on your blogs as well as news sites, readers will trust you, which is how you build credibility. The thing about backlinks is that these signal trustworthiness. High-quality backlinks contribute to your website’s domain authority.
Final Thoughts
Now you know that backlink quality analysis is crucial for your SEO, as high-quality backlinks are crucial for your website to rank higher. Loads of backlinks aren’t enough to help your website rank higher in SERPs. Checking the quality of backlinks comes down to performing regular SEO audits, which is a time-consuming process. To save your time and effort, you can hire the services of a well-reputed link-building agency, such as Globex IT Solutions. Our professional experts will never go for link schemes and other shortcuts, but they will correctly assess the quality of your backlinks and help you build high-quality backlinks.
FAQs
What is a high-quality backlink?
A high-quality backlink is essentially a high-quality backlink from an authoritative and relevant website that can help you boost your website’s Google ranking. A high-quality backlink is relevant to your niche and passes on link juice.
What is the importance of high-quality backlinks?
High-quality backlinks can boost your website’s ranking on Google and other search engines. This way, you can boost website visibility in search and boost your website traffic.
How can you index your backlinks faster?
To index your backlinks faster, you can integrate several factors, such as buying high-quality backlinks, establishing high-quality content, and manually submitting your URLs to Google.
How many times do you need to perform backlink quality analysis?
You should perform backlink quality analysis regularly and not just once. Regular backlink quality analysis will help you understand how your backlink profile affects your search engine rankings. You can also identify the areas in your SEO that could be improved.
