Link-building is much more than just another search engine optimization tactic. Apart from enhancing your positions in search engine result pages (SERPs), this technique (primarily) aims to build trust and authority, making your business look credible in the eyes of both search engines and users. Yes, it gives you a broader outreach. But most importantly, it gives you a higher likelihood of engagement, conversion, and loyalty through trust.

Does this mean that having more backlinks is good for you? Not in a way you may think of it. Although more links equal more exposure, trust is built on reputation. That is, the quality and trustworthiness of your links will always matter more than their quantity.

So, what makes a good mention, and how to get high-quality backlinks? This guide will discuss the main metrics that define a good backlink to help you find the answer.

What Defines a Good Backlink?

Defining the quality of backlinks can be somewhat tricky. In short, there are three factors that determine the rank of the mention:

1- Relevance — People would not trust something that’s irrelevant to them or appears in the content they consume out of the blue. Every mention should perfectly align with your business, vision, and target audience, as well as with the content provided by the donor.

2- Donor’s authority —The site that links back to you (the donor) needs to have a strong reputation and trust of the audience. Otherwise, people will not likely click. 

3- Naturalness — Modern consumers don’t enjoy intrusive and overly salesy ads. Respectively, they don’t like artificial links that they don’t buy into. That's why how naturally your mention appears on the donor’s site also matters a lot. Due to the same reason, it’s more important to earn your mentions thanks to high-quality content rather than purchasing them.

Apart from these three factors, there are also a few technical specs that distinguish high-quality backlinks from poor ones. Firstly, these specs relate to the type of link–dofollow or nofollow. The first type passes on the “link juice” (the authority or ranking power) from the donor to your site, whereas the second one doesn’t. Additionally, the anchor text and placement also play important roles.

Top Link Metrics to Assess the Quality

If you’ve decided to level up your SEO game by getting quality backlinks, there are plenty of tactics that can get you started. From guest posting to the skyscraper technique–you can try different opportunities to gain quality mentions. Yet, one thing that remains of the utmost importance is analytics.

Analytics helps find weak spots and refine the approach. Here are the top metrics to look at to measure the quality of backlinks:

Anchor Text Relevancy

Anchor text is the text the link is attached to. It matters both to Google and users themselves—Google uses anchors to assess the relevance of the destination URL to the donor’s website, which matters for rankings, and users rely on it to decide if they should click or not. Thus, when evaluating your profile, anchor texts are one of the first things you should be focusing on.

In a perfect setting, your anchors should always be:

• Perfectly aligned to your own business and the donor’s website, and a particular piece of content.

• Descriptive to help users know what they will find if they click, and to help Google assess the relevance.

• Keyword-rich–generic phrases like “click to learn more” won’t bring as much of the desired result as anchors that use one of the terms you’ve targeted in your keyword research.

Domain and Page Trust

These two link metrics can have different names depending on the specific analytical tools you use. Yet, they are both crucial for assessing your profile. In a nutshell, these metrics reflect the overall reputation and trustworthiness of a particular domain and individual pages under it. Measuring them helps predict the likelihood of a particular site or page to rank well in SERPs.

The more quality links you receive, the higher your scores will be in these two metrics. Hence, they are also among the top things worth considering in your analytics.

Toxicity Score

This metric measures the quality of each individual metric. To be more specific, it assesses the potential harm a given mention can cause to your SEO. 

A high toxicity score typically reveals the poor quality of mentions. Respectively, keeping an eye on this metric can help you identify and address links that may cause more damage to your website.

Referral Traffic

The following metric stands for traffic (site visits) that comes to you from third-party domains, including from links placed on external websites. It helps you gauge the number of people who click on your mentions and land on your website. Simply put, it demonstrates the interest and trust of the audience.

By assessing referral traffic, you can attain two goals. First, you can measure the effectiveness of your guest posts, anchors, and other aspects of your link-building strategy in attracting people to your site. And secondly, you can identify unwanted referral traffic that comes from poor-quality sites.

Broken Backlinks

Broken mentions are those that don’t have an active connection between the donor and destination URL. This results in users seeing a 404 error when trying to follow the link.

When your mentions don’t work, this disrupts user experience, hinders trust, damages crawling and indexing processes, and, eventually, affects your rankings and traffic. Thus, keeping an eye on your broken mentions is also pivotal for assessing the quality of your entire profile.

Tools to Analyze Backlink Quality

Now that you know about the primary metrics that can help you differentiate the best SEO backlink from a poor one, you must be wondering how you keep an eye on them in the first place. Good news? Doing this is very easy with the right software.

With the best backlink checker tool, you will have all the information about your mentions at hand and will be able to measure the key metrics easily and effectively, attaining greater results. The list of available tools is huge, though. This can make it hard to make a choice. Here are the core things you should keep in mind when selecting your solution:

• User-friendly interface

• Comprehensive and accurate data

• Customizable filters

• Analytics of anchor text

• Competitor analysis capability

• Quick and easy export opportunities

• Alignment with your budget

Red Flags—Backlinks to Avoid

Since you already know what makes a good mention, let’s quickly look at the factors that make poor backlinks, those that harm your positions in SERPs and brand reputation.

Here are the core red flags to watch out for:

Low-key content —High-quality links appear in relevant content that delivers value. If the donor publishes plagiarized, irrelevant, poorly written, or spammy content, this will reflect on the quality of your mentions. A lack of content optimization is also a warning sign.

Unrelated or spammy websites — Getting mentioned by low-grade websites is typically much easier than earning links from reputable sources. Yet, when a website is non-trustworthy or generally irrelevant to your brand, it will do more harm than good. Lastly, spammy sites with an abundance of ads and pop-ups can also harm.

Unnatural link patterns — Anything that might look suspicious to Google can hinder your rankings. This can involve a sharp spike in backlink quantity in a short time, a huge volume of mentions from irrelevant sites, and excessive use of identical anchor text.

Manipulative tactics — Lastly, different black-hat manipulations with backlinks can lead to lowered rankings and other penalties from Google. This applies to all manipulative tactics that violate Google’s spam policies, including buying mentions, using link farms, etc.

The Bottom Line: How to Build and Maintain a High-Quality Backlink Profile

So, you already know what makes a good mention, what key metrics to measure, how to select a good analytical tool, and what red flags to watch out for. The only question that’s left is how to build a good link profile.

The top techniques for earning (and maintaining) high page rank backlinks include:

• Use content-driven strategies to acquire mentions naturally. 

• Foster relationships with reputable sources. 

• Reclaim unlinked brand mentions and fix broken links.

• Delve into the profiles of your competitors to explore promising opportunities. 

Most importantly, focus on the originality and value of your content to create high-quality backlinks and drive long-term success. And don’t neglect analytics to assess your outcomes and improve.