Friends who do Google SEO know that nowadays, if SEO wants to do well, content quality, user experience, website speed, external link quality, etc. are all as high as possible, and they are indispensable. When it comes to content, user experience, and site speed, the good and the bad are clear enough and needless to say. But for high-quality external links, many friends are confused: What are high-quality external links? What are its functions? What are the evaluation indicators for high-quality external links? How to make high-quality external links? …
Today we will focus on the evaluation criteria of high-quality external links. Only with standards can we have judgment, avoid detours, and do less useless work.
Let’s summarize first:
There are “six highs” for high-quality external links: high relevance, high weight, high traffic, high stability, high-quality pages, and high difficulty
1. High correlation
Why should high correlation be ranked first?
Because almost all irrelevant external links can be called spam external links, which are harmful but useless.
For example, if you make glass bottles and you have external links from a sock site, Google will be very depressed, why why why? Are your socks made from glass bottles? Isn’t this funny? It’s obvious cheating.
Of course, backlinks can be relevant to you on different levels, with search engines considering the overall relevance of the linking site, the relevance of the specific web page to the link, and the relevance of the content directly surrounding the link.
In addition, highly relevant external links can attract precise traffic to you and promote conversions.
2. High weight
I divide the high weight of external links into two parts: the weight of the source domain, the weight of the source page and the weight of the external link position.
There are many indicators and tools for judging the weight of the external link’s source domain and the weight of the source page. The indicators I often use are DA and PA.
Of course, don’t forget to check the age of the website. Generally speaking, the older the website, the greater the weight.
Judging the weight of external link positions is also very simple.
Because the type of link that search engines pay more attention to is the back link in the content, if your external link is located in the main content area of the page, that is, in the core area of the page, it will be better than if it is located at the bottom of the page or in the sidebar or page. Links in the feet have higher weight.
When using Ahrefs to view external links, external links located in the main content area of the page will be marked with “CONTENT”, as shown below:
3. High traffic
The high traffic here has two meanings: high traffic to the website and web pages; high traffic brought by external links to the website.
Website traffic can be checked using tools such as SEO Quake, Ahrefs or SEMrush.
For the traffic of the page where the external link is located, you can use the Organic Research function of SEMrush, as shown below. You only need to enter the URL of the page in the input box, then select as URL, and then click Search.
If the traffic of the website is high and the traffic of the webpage where the external link is located is also high, the quality of the external link may be higher because it is more likely to bring a large amount of relevant traffic to the website.
Regarding the traffic that external links bring to the website, you need to make judgments in the early stage, and you can use Google Analytics in the later stage.
As shown in the picture below, click the “Channel” option under all traffic, and then select “Source/Media” or “Source” to see an overview of the traffic brought to you by the corresponding website of the external link.
4. High stability
The stability of external links largely reflects the quality of external links. The sudden increase and decrease in external links has a great negative impact on the SEO of the website.
Uncle Google has studied several websites before and found that a significant reduction in external links will lead to a drop in traffic.
You can use Ahrefs’ Backlink profile to check the stability of your external links.
If the number of external links always drops, it means that the quality of the external links is poor.
5. High-quality pages
The high quality of the external link source page is reflected in the following aspects: the page content is of high quality, the page has few export links, and the export link is Dofollow
High-quality content means that the content on the source page must be original, valuable, and readable.
In the past, the usual method used by many friends was to write a bunch of pseudo-original articles and then publish them on major platforms. This method should really be abandoned. In an era where spam is everywhere, do you have to act as a spam generator? Visitor bounce rate and dwell time have already given you away.
Therefore, it is recommended that when you post in the forum or make a guest post, you should treat the content on your own website without slacking off.
I have done some guest posts before. Due to the high content quality and the high weight of the platform, I quickly got a ranking, and then started to deliver a steady stream of traffic to my website. This may be what we are after.
The more export links a page has, the more diluted the weight of the page is, and the less weight will be transferred to you. If a page has 100 points, if there are 5 links, each link will be worth 20 points; if there are 100 links, only one link will be worth one point.
As a rule of thumb, external link source pages with less than 10 export links are considered good.
In addition to the content and number of export links, you should also pay attention to the type of external links. Dofollow type external links allow the weight of the source page to be transferred to you, which is more beneficial to your Google SEO.
6. High difficulty
The easier a backlink is to obtain, the less valuable it is likely to be.
This is easy to understand. If you can get a certain external link within a few minutes or a few dollars, then this external link can be easily copied by your competitors. In other words, before you have this external link, your opponent has already obtained it. It’s up. It is difficult to see any results from this type of external links.
In other words, the higher the quality of the external link, the more energy or money you have to spend.
Jin Zhu Zhe Chi is also applicable to external links. If many of your links appear together with links from some high-quality websites, especially when they are in the same position on the web page, Google will feel that the quality of your website should also be good. Being treated favorably. Of course, it is relatively difficult to obtain such external links.