Questions about how to assess backlink quality

Hey Friends,

While trying to improve our backlinks I've run into some questions that I hope experienced link builders will know the answer to:

• I started off believing that the Domain Rating of a site was the best determinator of its value as a backlink, but the "juice" provided depends on how many outgoing links there are on this site, right? Does that mean that a site with a domain rating of 15 could be a better backlink than one with a domain rating of 70?
  
  
• How much does the subject matter of the linking site or page affect its value? Example: if I have a site about flower shops linked from a site about car parts, is that automatically worse than being linked by another flower shop website, even if it has a lower DR?
  
  
• Is there any way to determine how much "juice" an individual backlink or domain is providing my website? We use Ahrefs for competitor research, but I haven't found a tool in there to help me find the answer to this.

Sorry if these are super naive - Im a coder and usually I create websites that become someone else's SEO problem. Thanks for reading.

That depends on the type of backlinks that are on the site. Backlinks to "bad neighborhooods" and spammy sites will negatively impact your domain rating. Ahref gives you tools to assess the quality of the backlnks and normally their DR value correlates with that. But also use Majestic's Trust factor to check the trustworthyness of the links.

Your links also need to be relevant and contextual. If you are selling flowers, then your links should be related to flowers or a related subject

There is no way. Juice is an esoteric term. Lots of algorithms are implemented by Google to assess the valuye of a domain so the term link "juice" can only be guessed at. What you do know is that the "juice" will have diminishing value as you start linking out a lot and including low quality backlinks on a page. The further away the link (i.e tier 2-3) is to the money site, will also mean ther is less link "juice" being passed down.

The count of external links Is just a one parameter that determines amount of the link juice that will be transmitted.

But how about the location of link on page?

How about a size of a link as an HTML object?

What about a number of traffic that goes through that given link in comparison to other links on that page?

Yes, domain authority is extremely important, but how about page authority?

But what if this website is banned in Google and has zero traffic from it? I bet to that link from that website that has high domain authority is worthless.

What I’m trying to say here is that you have to create your own checklist for website evaluation and just score link opportunities according to it.

Good luck!