What Makes a High Quality Backlink? Enhancing Your Website’s Authority Through Backlinks
Obtaining backlinks, also known as external links, from other websites remains a potent strategy for elevating your search engine rankings. However, not all backlinks are created equal.
A few high-quality backlinks can substantially boost your SEO endeavors, while an abundance of low-quality links may yield minimal gains or even damage your ranking if deemed spammy.
The Three Tiers of Backlinks
In Google’s view, backlinks are classified into three categories: low-quality, medium-quality, and high-quality. Specifically, Google identifies low-quality backlinks as webspam—links fabricated to manipulate the system and contravene Google’s guidelines.
Medium-quality links deliver value and are more attainable than high-quality ones, which demand stricter editorial standards.
The Three Fundamental Aspects of Top-notch Backlinks
Determining what constitutes a high-quality backlink remains subjective, as the precise criteria used by search engines remain undisclosed. However, most SEO experts concur on three key elements.
Characteristics of a High-Quality Backlink
1: Natural
High-quality backlinks should arise naturally, driven by website owners who choose to link to your content due to its value for their audience. They should not result from payment or manipulative tactics.
This organic approach exemplifies the concept of “earning” a backlink, distinguishing it from artificial links typically intended to deceive search engines into perceiving a website as more reputable than it truly is.
Google’s response to unnatural or spammy backlinks involves initially ignoring them and, for repeated violations, imposing penalties such as demotion in search engine rankings.
2: Reputable
In addition to being natural, backlinks must be reputable. Modern search engines assess the credibility of webpages based on social proof. Google’s PageRank algorithm, though no longer publicly available as a metric, measured the importance and reputation of webpages.
PageRank operates by evaluating the quantity and quality of links to a page, offering an estimate of a website’s importance. The assumption is that more important websites receive more links from others.
While Google no longer provides a PageRank metric due to its misuse by spammers, PageRank remains a conceptual foundation rather than a metric.
The ‘Rel’ Link Attribute
Discussing search engine reputation, it’s essential to address the ‘rel attribute,’ which can be added to an HTML link. Standard HTML links lack this attribute, allowing search engines to pass PageRank from one page to another.
However, HTML links with values in the ‘rel attribute’ may not fully pass search engine reputation. These values include ‘sponsored,’ ‘ugc’ (user-generated content), and ‘nofollow.’
Though the ‘nofollow’ attribute existed for some time, Google later introduced ‘sponsored’ and ‘ugc’ rel attributes. Google permits all three to serve as hints for crawling, indexing, and ranking.
While the ‘nofollow’ and ‘sponsored’ attributes likely have limited impact on search engine rankings, the influence of ‘ugc’ links, such as those from blog or forum comments, remains uncertain.
To check if a link has a ‘rel attribute,’ one can right-click on a link in Google Chrome, select ‘Inspect,’ and examine the HTML code.
Metrics Resembling PageRank
Moz offers a Page Authority (PA) score, predicting how well a specific page will rank in search engine results. Ahrefs provides a URL Rating (UR) score, measuring a target URL’s backlink profile strength and its likelihood of ranking highly in Google.
Both metrics mimic PageRank’s impact on rankings and are measured on a logarithmic scale from 1 to 100, with higher scores indicating greater ranking potential.
Backlinks with higher PageRank scores and those without a ‘rel attribute’ are more likely to pass reputation and enhance a page’s ranking. While Google no longer provides PageRank data, Moz and Ahrefs offer free metrics to replicate its behavior.
3. Relevance
The third fundamental aspect of a high-quality backlink is relevance. Search engines evaluate both the page and domain’s relevance when considering backlinks.
For example, if you operate a fitness membership website called Peak Fitness 365 and offer a course titled “5K to Marathon in Six Months,” a backlink from a business news website, while relevant to marathon training content, may lack domain relevancy.
However, if your marathon course is featured on Runner’s World, a renowned source in the running industry, it would score high in both page and domain relevancy.
Additionally, the anchor text used in the backlink plays a crucial role. In this case, the anchor text “5K to Marathon in Six Months” provides a relevancy signal for keywords related to “5K to marathon training.”
Balancing Relevance and Reputation
Returning to the backlink on the hypothetical business news website, it may possess low domain relevancy and mediocre reputation metrics. While it may not be a perfect backlink, expecting all backlinks to be high-quality is unrealistic.
Despite its limitations, this backlink is natural and won’t harm your search engine reputation. It also provides some relevancy due to its content. Furthermore, even though the page and domain reputation are relatively low in the running industry, they contribute positively to your backlink profile.
In conclusion, this backlink can be categorized as medium-quality, leaning towards the lower end. It isn’t high-quality because the domain lacks significant relevance or authority, but it isn’t low-quality since it doesn’t violate Google’s webmaster guidelines.
In Summary: What Makes a High Quality Backlink
A high-quality backlink is natural, highly reputable, and relevant. While high-quality backlinks yield the most value, medium-quality links can still provide momentum, while low-quality or spammy links should be avoided at all costs.
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