How To Evaluate A Site Or Webpage For Backlinking

Link building has often been seen as the task we most like to avoid. Building backlinks to your site can be painful and tedious and you will have to deal with plenty of non-responders and time wasters on your search for those favourable links. Scouring the web for potential websites to link to is a time-consuming process and because All links aren't created equal its important to make sure you spend your energies on securing the best links.

By putting together a backlink evaluation sheet you can rank links by order of importance and give the content or terms you're searching for the required boost you're looking for and ramp up your individual webpages as well as your domain. By securing premium links on a regular basis you'll not only improve the visibility of your site but its ability to compete for rankings. 

So how do you evaluate the links you would like to secure? Well, there are a few factors you should consider.

Content

Before you begin to look externally for support and amplification you first need to review the content you want to start having stranger sites point links towards. Ensure that your content has the correct keyword targetting and is of a high standard before approaching other sites. Sites aren't simply going to link to any old landing page and to convince the best sites to link to you, your content has to have actual value.

Additionally when you've created the correct type of content and deep dived into the various granular content types required to rank you can then look externally to find supporting webpages. Quality content links to quality content so once you've created a superior piece and gone through the process, it will make it easier to identify what a superior piece of content reads and looks like. 

Context

While the content may be amazing and may rank for certain keywords you've searched for it may not make perfect sense to link to your content. It's not enough to simply have the ideal keyword referenced on the page you want a link from, the link actually needs to make sense within the context of the content. If it doesn't the referral traffic from it will only lead to a high bounce rate and believe it or not Google does a pretty good job of finding spammy or weak link building practices. 

Domain authority

Allow me to add a disclaimer before we head further down the list. As you can see from the next few metrics I am a huge fan of Moz and its link evaluation metrics, this is not to discount other tools, but Moz has simply been my preffered tool. Domain authority is an excellent metric for gauging the overall health of a domain you're looking to approach. Domain authority provides a measuring stick to gauge this sites ability to rank and the inherited link equity the webpages on its domain receive as well as what they could pass on to your site. 

Page authority

Page authority is metric that measures the influence a single page has and how it contributes to the health of the overall domain as well as the level of link juice you could receive if you were to secure a link on it.

Backlink profile

Checking the number of domains that are linking to that specific page or the domain is a good indication of how much influence the site carries and how much of an endorsement you would receive should they link to your webpage.

Spam score

The sheer number of links isn't a great indicator of health when viewed in isolation and sites can be using link farms, link spinning, or buying links from low equity or spam sites. This would naturally give them a higher spam score, while spam score might not be one of the most important factors, it does give you a good idea of which sites you may want to avoid or put in less effort when negotiating for links. 

Believe it or not but in 2019 webmasters still, feel they can scam their way to the top of search engine results pages so it's important to do a link audit on every potential link you're looking at adding to your backlink profile. 

Make sure you're well prepared

By having a comprehensive backlink audit guide it gives you the confidence persue links, know which websites to negotiate with, which links would be a nice to have and which links you really want to secure. By optimising your approach to link building you will be able to build a healthy and diverse backlink profile that looks organic and assists in improving your SEO.

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Recommended reading

If you enjoyed this post and have a little extra time to dive deeper down the rabbit hole, why not check out the following posts on link building.

• How To Use The Forgotten Art of Dead Link Building To Boost SEO
• How To Build Local Links To Your Website
• Improve Interlinking With 12 Types of Anchor Text

Tags: seo, link building