How do I know if the backlinks I buy are quality?
you need to know SEO so you can be able to assess each backlink individually. But in general, backlinks that...
- are hard to get
- cost money
- both
...are usually quality links.
But this might not always be true, so you gotta dive deeper into analysis.
So, you want backlinks that meet most / all of these criteria:
- come from quality sites (quality sites = sites that google trusts, they rank in google for lots of keywords and have been having google traffic for months)
- the sites have at least some authority (DR)... if the sites have 0-10 DR they can still be worth something as long as google trusts them and has been giving them traffic for months. But if you're only interested in strong backlinks then you definitely want sites with high DR (high DR is subjective, but I'd say everything over 30 - as long as the DR is LEGITIMATE and not artificially boosted by weird tactics - is worth getting links from)
- the sites (or at least the pages where your backlinks are placed) are at least slightly relevant to the topic of your page / site. Relevant backlinks are pretty important, so try to get backlinks from as many sites / pages that are related to your site (or to the page on your site that you're going to link to) as possible...
- the pages where your links are placed need to be indexed in google.... Actually, I'm not sure they need to be indexed in google, if you're buying guest posts, for example, your guest post will definitely be on a page that's not indexed in google yet. But this doesn't mean that the backlinks are useless, because it's possible in a few days / week your guest post will get indexed and in the coming weeks / months your guest post will start ranking or get traffic in various ways, which will make your backlinks so valuable...
- the pages where your links are placed need to have ONLY your links on them. If you place your backlinks on pages with other backlinks (external ones, though, not internal links) you might want to re-negotiate the deal... or find other pages that have no OBLs (Outbound Links) yet...
- your links should be placed in the first 1-3 positions on the page. So, for example, if you buy a guest post for $100 on a good website, but the first link in your guest post is to Wikipedia, the 2nd one is to WebMD, and only the 3rd and 4th backlinks on that page are to your site you are being kind of screwed because google tends to reward the first 2 links on the page with most of the link juice (authority), so you want your backlinks to be in the first 2 spots on the page, although - to be honest - if you buy guest posts you should DEMAND from the seller that ONLY your backlinks are in your guest post, otherwise you're being scammed....
- preferably, you want your backlinks to be d0follow, so make sure (or specify this to the seller) that your backlinks don't have nofollow tags appended to them. If your links are tagged with the "nofollow" attribute it means that your backlinks will not transfer too much authority to your site, and you're basically paying for that authority, so you need to make sure that the person who gives you a guest post doesn't sneakily add nofollow tags to your backlinks or else you're being screwed... Of course, this doesn't mean that 100% of your backlinks should be d0follow as this creates a footprint that google can identify you by, and consider you a link builder and google hates link builders and they'll penalize them as soon as they catch them.... So, make sure that you have both d0follow and nofollow backlinks in your profile, but try to make the majority of the quality links d0follow, while the less important backlinks you can leave nofollow...
Last but not least, when you analyze a site to see if it's worth getting links from, check its content pages thoroughly and see how many (if any) OBLs are on those pages. A site that has OBLs on every single content page is considered link farm (link farm = site that exists only to sell links) and google doesn't like such sites and they penalize them whenever they catch them.
So, if you see that a site has backlinks to other sites like yours (so, internal links don't count, and you actually want to see internal links in your guest posts, so don't mind those!) in every content page it can be a bad sign, and you should probably avoid getting links from that site.
There is no exact ratio of linkless pages to backlinked pages that's safe, but I think 1 page with OBLs in every 10 pages (that have no OBLs) is a safe bet that the website is not a link farm, so you can probably get links from that site safely...
This is how you can tell which backlinks are quality.... or, rather, how to find quality link building opportunities....
Something else you should pay attention to (because this is very misleading, especially for newbies) is sites that have a lot of authority (DR or DA over 50, for example), but have no traffic and no strong backlinks.
The DR / DA of websites is usually given by the quantity and quality of the backlinks that point to those sites, but if you see sites with high DR or DA metrics but their backlinks are garbage, this is usually a sign that the owners of those websites are using shady tactics to inflate the DR / DA of their sites artificially so they can trick people like you into buying links from those websites. And that's obviously not good because those links are worthless and they might even harm your site if certain conditions are met.
To figure out if a site has legit DR / DA or fake DR / DA you can check a few things, such as...
- the ratio of backlinks to RDs (how many backlinks vs. how many referring domains) the site has. Many times, sites with fake DR / DA have 1:1 ratio of backlinks to RDs (for example, 500 RDs and 500 backlinks, which is very unnatural because in real life all websites that are legitimate have much more backlinks than RDs). So, if you see a site with high DR (51 for example) that has 200 RDs and 200 backlinks this is almost always a sign that the DR is fake and that you should stay away from that website. But if the DR is 51 and the site has 2k RDs, for example, and 16k backlinks... well, this might be a good site with real DR. You still need to check the backlinks (at least the top ones) thoroughly to make sure that they're legit, but the point is that as long as the RDs to backlinks ratio is not 1:1 then the site could be legit, and its authority (DR / DA) could be legit too...
- another giveaway is the low / zero traffic. Sites that have high authority (DR / DA) don't have zero traffic, and google can easily tell that such a site is worthless, therefore the links coming from such a site are worthless too, and can even make google penalize your site if you get a link from a website with high DR but low / zero traffic. So, analyze each site and their backlinks (and traffic) very carefully, and if you see stuff that doesn't add up avoid that website...
- and lastly, sites that have fake authority usually have a lot of redirect backlinks (especially google redirects from sites like google.jp, google.co.uk, google.de, google.ua, etc.) .... it's these redirects that are used to artificially boost the DR of a website, so if you see a site with lots of google redirects and high authority (especially if this site has OBLs on every content page) to me this is a dead giveaway that the site is bad and it should be avoided....
Follow these tips, use a bit of common sense and intuition, and you will be able to discern between good links (or, like I said, good linking opportunities) and bad links.
Also something else worth mentioning is that these tips pertain to common backlinks (PBNs, guest posts, niche edits), not to all types of backlinks. And this is important to mention because - while the quality PBNs, quality guest posts, and quality niche edits - are the most powerful links you can get and which have the highest ranking power, they are not the only links worth getting and - depending on circumstance (niche, goal, etc) - you might (and probably should) get other types of backlinks too that - for now - are still safe to get, such as...
- foundation links (also known as profile links), which are links in your profile / bio on big authority sites like author.me, disqus, soundcoud, etc....
- directory links (these are particularly good links if you have a local business and are participating in local / national online directories)
- UGC links (UGC = User Generated Content, which is basically sites in which the content is generated by those sites' users, such as Reddit, Stackoverflow, etc... such links are still safe to get so try to get them if you can / makes sense for your site / niche / business / goal)
- forum links (links that come from threads with engagement in popular forums are always worth getting and are still safe to get. But the trick, like I said, is for the thread in which your link is inserted to have replies)
- social media links (or, rather, signals I should say), such as tweets, shares, etc. from sites like Tweeter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc... if you can get social signals from aged accounts with lots of activity (both current and past) these social signals can be gold too, not only for SEO but for traffic too...
- if you have a visual site (about food recipes, or collectibles for example), getting links from image sharing sites like Imgur, Flickr, DeviantArt, Pinterest, etc (and again, especially if you're getting links from aged accounts with lots of activity / engagement on these websites) those links can help with both SEO and traffic
