Below we share the different factors involved in judging the quality of a link:
- relevance
- authority
- diversity
- sustainability
Let’s break them down:
Link relevance
- Page relevance: You should get links from pages that have content relevant to your website. Think about your target audience, and what kind of content they would be reading. Those are the pages you should get links from. If it makes sense as a place where you’d want referral traffic, it’s probably a good link and what Google is striving for anyway. If not, then it’s probably a bad choice.
- Topical relevance: This is about what happens on the pages of your website that get the link. Obviously, the content of these pages must be relevant to your audience and brand. If you’re running a blog on casino games, get links from other gaming, betting, and gambling sites could make sense.
Link diversity
- New links vs. existing links: Getting many links from the same domain is useful. But you should try to get them from lots of different domains. Links from different domains shows Google that you truly are a high-quality website.
- Type of linking page: You want diversity in the types of pages that link to your website. Is it a forum? Is it a blog post? Is it a new website? Aim for diversity.
- Position of link: This is less important than the others, but it still matters to a degree. If you’re getting lots of links from website footers, that’s not a prime location for someone to actually click on and come through to your website. Links within the body of a post are best.
Link authority
This is about how much strength, authority, and link equity a domain can pass to you from their own. Think one step further, and ask yourself who links to the websites that link to you. The higher the authority of these websites, the stronger the link.
Link sustainability
Some links are more sustainable than others. Some are fleeting, some are more permanent. A lot of it simply has to do with the site linking to you.
But some also involves the quality of your page. Is it evergreen content that can stay relevant for years, if not a decade-plus? That’s likely to stay longer than a page that decays quickly (e.g., news).
