In this article let’s talk about how to tell if a link or what’s called a Backlink is good and worth pursuing in your case. You can search it as what makes a high authority backlinks?
Now the bad news is that Google does not tell us the industry does not have a 100 percent foolproof method. There’s just that doesn’t exist.
So we have to approximate. And I’m going to give you the ways to approximate. There are a few factors that are very important.
The first factor is the relevance of a site if your site is about spaceships. And another site is about cooking. You don’t necessarily want that link but if you’re both talking about cooking great if you’re both talking about sports great relevance is extremely important.
If your relevant site links to you then it doesn’t have to be so prominent or authoritative that relevance is really important but the authority does help. And I’ll show you in a second how to measure authority of sites and how to look that up. Google uses something called authority to determine how trustworthy a site how respectable is it. Is it in the industry? And it’s essentially how many other sites link to it how many mentions does it have across the web in a second I’ll show you how to look that up.
And another thing that you want to understand is where on a Web site and how prominent on a page is your link going to be for example a link from a home page usually is a very good link because home pages the strength that is typically the strongest SEO page a web site has it usually most things are not from a home page usually most links come from secondary pages some content pages or something like that wealth effect if it’s a content page let’s say there’s a thousand words in that article if a link is coming from the comments on that article even below the article it’s nearly worthless at end of the link is like around the 800 words or the author bio which is at the end. On the page, that signals to Google that hey this content is important.
This link is important. That’s why it’s high up so the prominence of the link is important and you’re just going to get more traffic from people finding the link and clicking over to your site as well. Now another thing that’s important is how to crawl a bull is that Web site that’s going to link to you.
Is it well designed? Is it easy to navigate to the page which contains your link for example? If I have to click like ten times or five times just to navigate to your page then that page is pretty unimportant on that site and links on that page are going to have a less of a weight but if it’s a what’s called a second-level page where I just really need like one click or maybe third level page like I just need two or three clicks to navigate to the page that contains your link.
That page is a lot stronger a lot more important on that page in the eyes of Google and that link on that page will of course also carry more weight. So these are the things you want to look into before pursuing your link or worth evaluating is a link a good one for me. Now let me show you a tool that you can use to determine page authority. There are a few paid tools but I don’t want to send you to the direction of the Page Tools. I’m going to give you a way to find free tools always and free tools.
Sometimes they ask you to sign up. Sometimes they change the way they work. So the best way to find them is free too easy if you search Google for a free tool to look up the main authority just like this search will be. Sometimes these are called authority Checkers.
Well, you search for this. I’ve gone ahead and I’ve actually done the search so I don’t waste your time. I’ll show you the results domain authority is measured from 1 to 100 100 being gigantic. Almost nobody has that and one is your own. They want and small businesses usually will have like under 40.
That’s pretty good. If it’s under 20 that you had a lot of work to do. And a mid-sized business like some business that maybe has employees and is aiming to be much bigger than a one-person business maybe it’s between 40 and 60 and like something gigantic like CNN or even
Udemy will be in the 80s and 90s. So you see I ran my site through it and as a small business owner Web site I have domain authority 36 and you can even tell a few other factors about the Web site like external links to the domain that are pointing is twenty-four hundred and the age of the site. And usually, these kinds of sites tell you a little bit more information.
We just care domain authority and let’s run another one just to check.
So I’m going to say I’m not a robot and I’m going to enter Udemy just to see where it is. So I just looked up Udemy and you can see that the main authority is 91 on Udemy which is incredibly high and Page authority meaning the individual pages carry a little bit less weight 72 which is still amazing.
It’s really rare to get links from sites like this but they can really move the needle for you. But even if a site is in the 60s in the 50s and the 40s and even the 30s you know what.
And even the 20s but it’s relevant it’s still good. In one caveat here you see a site like Udemy is actually a good example because Udemy has courses on any topic. So how do we know that it’s relevant?
Well it’s first of all relevance is in the course niche so e-learning anything like that? But what about cooking classes.
What if let’s say you get a link from a cooking class. And by the way, you cannot get an external link from you to me.
This is all just an example. Then what happens is you have this page authority where let’s say if a page about cooking links to you and your site is about cooking that’s much better but if a page about databases links to you and your pages about cooking then it’s not that relevant so sometimes a page on a general site might be relevant for you in topic and that page is much better for you to get a link from than a page that is totally on a random topic.
So these are the factors that make up a good link.