how can you tell if a backlink is good or not ?

Backlinks are important, I know, but other than quantity vs quality,
how can you tell if a backlink is worth pursuing?

It's easy if you have the knowledge

1. Relevancy
2. Backlink profile of the target website (check with ahref or semrush it's easy)
3. Total OBL (some links are spammed to death, worthless)
4. Domain age
5. Website's content quality
6. DR (it can be faked easily)
7. Suspicious amount of exact brand traffic (ctr Manipulation, check for real traffic from real keywords)
8. Traffic Geo
9. Price (cheap links are trash ️)

tomguis said:

It's easy if you have the knowledge

1. Relevancy
2. Backlink profile of the target website (check with ahref or semrush it's easy)
3. Total OBL (some links are spammed to death, worthless)
4. Domain age
5. Website's content quality
6. DR (it can be faked easily)
7. Suspicious amount of exact brand traffic (ctr Manipulation, check for real traffic from real keywords)
8. Traffic Geo
9. Price (cheap links are trash ️)

Click to expand...

Good list. Two things I'd add, both about the page rather than the domain.

First, check that the page is indexed. Search the exact URL and see if it comes back. If it doesn't, nothing has crawled it yet, so the link isn't doing anything. Plenty of guest posts sit on pages that never get indexed at all.

Second, where the link sits. A link in the middle of a paragraph is worth more than one in a footer or sidebar that shows up on every page of the site.

Also worth seeing who else that page links out to. If you're one of twelve unrelated businesses on it, you know what you've bought.

And you're right about DR being fakeable. It's a guess about a whole domain when what you're actually buying is one page.

Check the referring page's indexing, traffic, outbound links and whether the link is placed naturally in useful content.

1. check in google search if this backlinks has indexed urls, and how many of them, and compare it with how many pages it has that should be indexed (approximatively).
2. Check it with ahrefs
3. check it in web.archive.org, if it wasnt used for spam or blackhat in the past.
4. Countries where it gets traffic from, ideally should be same country as your targeted country.
5. source of its traffic, at least 20% should be search engines (I am looking for 70%+ usually)

Yes a backlink can be valuable even if the site providing it is not particularly authoritative Instead of viewing it merely as a number in an SEO tool

I see it as an asset that can drive relevance trust traffic and discovery

vitocacciapaglia said:

Backlinks are important, I know, but other than quantity vs quality,
how can you tell if a backlink is worth pursuing?

Click to expand...

Check the history of the backlink

For me, a backlink is worth pursuing when it can bring both SEO value and the right audience. I usually look at relevance, the quality of the site, and whether people actually visit it. A link that can send real visitors is always more interesting to me than just a high metric.

A good backlink usually comes from a relevant, trusted website with real traffic, and the link is placed naturally in the content. Don’t just look at DA or DR, check the site’s overall quality too.