Quick question for the SEO guys here. Link Building Strategies

How are you currently deciding whether a backlink is actually worth getting?

I’m seeing more and more websites with really good metrics on paper, but when I manually check them, the site doesn’t seem that impressive.

DR/DA looks good.

Traffic looks decent.

But the actual pages sometimes have hundreds of outbound links, random topics, and articles that feel like they were created just for links.

At what point do you guys say “nope, not worth it”?

Do you mainly check:

• organic traffic
• relevance
• indexed pages
• outbound links
• traffic to the actual linking page
• site history
• or something else?

I’d also be interested in any tools you use for checking this quickly.

I’m trying to build a better filtering process because manually checking every domain is becoming a huge time sink.

worldofsmm said:

How are you currently deciding whether a backlink is actually worth getting?

Click to expand...

Apart from what you've mentioned, I look at:
RDs - referring domains, rather than total backlinks
Indexation - does a site:domain search bring back loads of indexed results or just a few (or none)
Ranks - is the site actually ranking for anything with more than ### monthly searches

Your decisions will also change depending on what you are wanting the backlink for - pointing at money pages, supporting other backlinks, giving brand identity, indexing parasites etc.

I check relevance and real traffic first. If the site covers random topics and every articles is full of outbound links, I normally skip it even if the DR looks great. Good metrics alone don't mean much anymore.

Don't place too much importance on DR/DA. What's truly important is getting backlinks from a site with good traffic and relevant to your industry.

I’d use two passes. First remove the obvious ones with no real rankings, a big traffic drop or hardly any topical overlap. Then manually open the homepage, one page getting traffic and two recent posts.

If all of them are covering random topics or packed with unrelated outgoing links, I’d skip the domain. No point doing a full audit when it already fails the basic checks. It should save a lot of time without relying on DR alone.

I usually check the actual traffic first. DR can look great but mean nothing if nobody’s really visiting the site.

For a link-building opportunity, I'd roughly evaluate the following:

Relevance → Organic Traffic → Linking Page Traffic → Site History → Link Profile → OBLs → Indexation → Authority Metrics