What Makes a Good Backlink?

Is there even such a thing as a good or a bad link? It turns out there is! Gone are the days when webmasters could use manipulative link building strategies to find a way to the top of search results. Acquiring thousands of backlinks from low-quality, unrelated sites may have worked in the past, but it won’t now.

Google Penguin, launched in 2012, was an update specifically targeted at combating black hat link building techniques. As a result of this update and the ones that came later, Google now evaluates the quality of backlinks. Having too many low-quality sources link to our content may be seen as a spam signal by search engines.

As a rule, we want ‘good’ links. At the same time, we want to avoid ‘bad’ links.

Link quality metrics

We are after ‘good’ links. Let’s elaborate ‘good’. There are certain metrics that can help evaluate the quality of backlinks.

Authority

There are two things that matter here; page authority and website authority.

Naturally, high-authority pages linking to our page will have a greater impact on our rankings than if low-authority pages were linking to us. Though Google uses its own PageRank algorithm to weigh page authority and the information isn’t available for public use, we can get a fair idea through the “Page Authority” score offered by Moz Link Explorer.