The Definition of the High Quality Backlink

We already read a lot about low quality backlinks and unnatural backlinks. What about the high quality ones? These are the ones that get your site upper and upper in the SERPs, so let’s focus for a minute and see what is so different on a high quality link versus a normal link.

From the point of jumping into a new business and landing on the first page in search engine results, there’s a long way. The SEO land is full of bad tips for getting backlinks from spammy websites and working with shady SEO consultant that will bring your in no time on the first page. Which is basically impossible to do in short time, if you want to grow your backlinks profile naturally.  

The debate about the influence of backlinks in rankings has never ended and evolved around the years. In case you’re a newbie and you want to grow your business, it is important to understand what Google sees as natural links and try to follow their advices and SEO experts tips. Some examples of valuable resources are:

• Webmaster Central Blog where are published news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index;
• Google support where you can find answers for a lot of questions regarding all Google’s products;
• Google forums where you can find real time advices to your problems from other people using the same Google products as you;
• cognitiveSEO blog where you can find case studies, guides, SEO insights. 

Link earning the is the most efficient and valuable technique of building high quality backlinks. It is a white hat technique, and it doesn’t imply the death of link building. For that you need to think in terms of quality content with valuable information, engaging communities through social networking and bonding, personalized user experience, outreach campaigns, influencer marketing programs built on relationships, media exposure in press releases and so on. Link roundups are also a great link building idea you should consider. 

From a generic point of view the overall important characteristics of a high quality link are:

Domain Authority

If an important domain has backlinks to your site, there is a good chance that your website has something important to say in your niche. Similar to real life, if an important person mentions you, the overall impression of the listeners will be influenced by his high authority in the field. That way your importance will grow and it can bring an increase in organic traffic, conversion rate.

Relevance

A relevant backlink is a link that is positioned on a site/page that talks about the same subject, or is in the same niche with your site. The relevance of a link may be given based on the content of the linking site or page and the contextual relevance of the words surrounding the link.

Uniqueness

A high quality link has even more power, if it’s hard for your competitors to get a natural link from the same source. Links from relevant and authority sites that only talk about your website and not your competitors can be considered great link opportunities because they are unique to your site. A quick example of such a link, would be conference sites that link to the companies and speakers that are participating at that conference. Naturally, not all your competitors can be present at that conference so that is a great place to build some high quality and unique links to your site.

Traffic

If a link is not clicked, than the initial purpose of the link is voided.  It is important to have your link in a visible place on the site so that people click it and therefore drive traffic to your site. For example, footer links can not be considered important as they are only seen by search engine crawlers and are rarely clicked by people.

A footer link on a popular domain can have a significant influence on your site and it can help you improve your rankings. On the other hand, multiple footer backlinks to your website from sites that connected with each other can bring you a Google Penguin penalty.

From a technical point of view, we can model the properties of a high quality link as follows:

• Authority
  • From a High Authority Referring Domain.
  • Linking Domain Ranks Well in Google.
  • Linking Domain has a lot of Referring Domains.

• Relevance
  • In the Same Niche as your site.
  • Links mostly to content in the same niche.

• Uniqueness
  • Does not link to all of your competitors.
  • Links to Informational sources mostly.

• Traffic
  • Has a Big Number of Visitors.
  • Has an Active Readership. (if it is a blog)
  • Has Good Social Media Exposure.

• Other Important Properties
  • In-Content Link. (from a blog or content page)
  • Few Links on the Linking Page.
  • The Site Links only to Relevant Content.
  • Non-Commercial Anchor Text Rich.
  • Non-Sponsored.

All of the aspects mentioned above fall into the white hat SEO tactics and this means it respects Google’s Quality Guidelines.

Looking forward to your characteristics of a high quality link. What do you think is “the thing” that best differentiates a highquality backlink from an average backlink?