When it comes to SEO, backlinks play a huge role, determining your page ranking, overall site authority, and much more. However, contrary to popular belief, any old backlink won’t do. The backlinks in which you have control over, for example, guest posts and sponsored posts, should be selected carefully.
If a backlink is of low quality, this will impact the ranking of individual pages and potentially your website. In basic terms, a backlink is a link from one site to another, almost a seal of approval between different sites. However, if a site has an already poor reputation and weak SEO scores, the link may be causing more harm than good, especially if the site has received a Google penalty in the past.
This blog post will discuss more on backlinks, more specifically, how to distinguish between good ones and bad ones.
Avoid backlinks with a high spam score
Firstly, on sites such as Moz, a spam score is created for each link and site. Those with particularly high spam scores are more likely to be penalized by Google. For this reason, you want to avoid receiving or linking to these sites, as this will affect your website, too.
Poor domain authority
The second indicator of a poor backlink for SEO purposes is poor domain authority. A domain authority shows the strength and worthiness of a site. Generally, those with lower scores are less reputable and may be considered ‘spam.’ This isn’t always the case, but it is a good indicator and something you should look out for.
Sites which are not indexed
Finally, if a site does not index all of its pages, or any of its pages, then you do not want to receive or give a backlink to this site. This may be a sign of underlying site health issues and will not contribute to your SEO (or, if it does, it will only contribute in a negative manner).
The bottom line
Link building is one of the more difficult concepts when it comes to SEO. However, when building backlinks, you should analyze the spam score, assess the domain authority of the site, and ensure all pages and posts are indexed – this is a great starting point to ensure you are receiving high-quality links.
