Develop a successful link building campaign: part 2

In this example, search engine crawl bots will follow (i.e., crawl) the link because nothing is telling them not to do so (e.g., a rel=nofollow in the tag).

Ultimately, there must be something in place that tells search engine crawl bots whether or not to follow or “count” a link. Conversely, a nofollow tag is used to indicate that you cannot be certain of the authority or trustworthiness of the external site page being linked to.

1. Link relevance

• How relevant is the link to the page it connects with?
• How relevant are the two sites to each other?
• How relevant is the website that gives the link to the industry as a whole? For example, a page talking about flowers that links to a website about gambling is out of context and would not be considered a good link.

2. Link position
The best links are in the body of the content and need to be put in the copy by the webmaster. Links in the comments, footers, or headers of a page are usually seen as spammy and ultimately dangerous. This is a result of an old (and underhanded) practice of stuffing a high number of irrelevant links into these sections of websites. Google eventually caught on and subsequently devalued these types of links.

Hidden links (i.e., links that are not visible to a user until it is clicked) are especially risky as they are a clear sign of an attempt being made to trick search engine crawl bots into counting links that users cannot see.

3. Domain Authority or Domain Rating of the website giving the link
Domain Authority (DA) and Domain Rating (DR) are made up metrics (from 1-100) that Moz (DA) and Ahrefs (for DR) use to score a web domain as a whole. A brand new website with little to no traffic will likely have a DA/DR of 0. A more authoritative website, like Facebook, has a score of 100. It’s a sound practice to use both DA and DR when qualifying websites, but there are others tools to utilize as well (e.g., Semrush’s authority score, Majestic’s Citation and Trust Flow).

Page Authority (PA), a metric that indicates the strength of an individual webpage, is also an important factor in a backlink’s strength. You can identify PA by using Moz’s link explorer. From there, Moz will show you the authority of any specific page on a scale of 0-100.

As a general rule of thumb, the higher the DA, the better the link.

While you can leverage Moz’s DA for strength scoring, you can also leverage other tools to understand the power of a link, including

• Semrush: Use this all-in-one tool suite to understand if a page has non-brand traffic and keyword rankings that are improving month-to-month. Pages with more keyword rankings and more traffic have more value.

• Ahrefs: Use this SEO software suite to look at competitors’ backlink profiles to find relevant backlinking opportunities. You can also use Ahrefs to look at your own backlink profile to find old, irrelevant, or broken backlinks that you should reach out to the webmaster to get updated to priority URL targets (i.e., URLs that you would like to drive traffic to in order to increase visibility on the search engine results page).

• Majestic: This SEO software tool’s useful “topical trust flow” metric allows you to see where your competitors are receiving backlinks so you can better build out linking campaigns around these topic clusters.

• Screaming Frog: Use this tool to quickly scrape websites (i.e., retrieve/extract content and source code data from them)to find potential linking opportunities through external links on blogs and editorial content.

In a nutshell, the most sought-after links are from websites with high domain and page authority, and these are the backlinks you most want to secure for your content. The best case scenario is to get a link from a high-authority site closely related to your own (e.g., same industry, similar audience).

Looking for help getting high-quality backlinks to your site that adhere to the philosophy, “earn backlinks from websites that are authoritative and relevant to your industry”? Reach out to DEPT® to connect with our team of experienced SEO professionals.