What are high-quality backlinks? If we look for this answer from Google, we get a hint that links from prominent websites help Google identify that the information is well trusted. However, not all backlinks are created equal. Some help your website pages rank higher on Google, while others apparently do nothing, and some links even hurt your rankings. 

So, this blog aims to answer the question of what are high-quality backlinks that help your website rank higher. 

Initially, what you can do is identify your competitors’ high-quality backlinks. This way, you get to know which pages are worth getting a link from. It would be best to consider a few things to evaluate relevant websites to your niche for getting high-quality backlinks. Here you go!

Context Relevance

First, ask if the website’s content is relevant to your niche or not? This can be better understood with an example. Let’s suppose you ask two of your friends to recommend the best tomato soup restaurant in the city. One of your friends is a chef at a decent restaurant, and the other is a football coach who is allergic to tomatoes. Whose opinion would you find more credible? Probably the chef’s view, right? Since you know that they hold experience in restaurants and know more about food taste and quality. Similarly, links from a website about Italian food, Italy, or recipes have more credibility than those links from websites about cosmetics and jewelry.

If you see the page linking to a high-ranking page for the keyword, mobile app development, and marketing, but if you visit the website, it seems more like a personal blog on random subjects rather than mobile app development or marketing.  So with regards to website relevance, it’s not the perfect scenario.

Topic Relevance

On the other hand, if you see another link on a website that includes app or development type keywords right there in the website domain name, this can help you quickly figure out that this site is relevant to your niche. Here we conclude that one of the attributes of high-quality backlinks is it is appropriate to your niche. 

Now you must be thinking that what about websites like publications and news covers a ton of topic on their website. This is where you need to ask yourself that the page is relevant to your niche. Websites like Forbes, The New York Times, and CNBC share articles on various topics site-wide. Since they cover a broad range of topics on their website, t doesn’t mean that links from there are worthless. In fact, reality can be the opposite. On the other hand, if a website talks about economics and politics, a mobile app development website shouldn’t reach out to that website for a backlink as the website is not relevant topically and contextually. 

So, the above explanation was related to the topical and contextual relevance of a website for getting backlinks. Let’s move to locational relevance regarding the quality of backlinks. 

Location Relevance

If you are a mobile app developer based in Dallas, you’d probably want to rank your page at the same location and the surrounding area. Your target audience is most likely to be there than anywhere else. So, apparently, it would be worth getting backlinks from websites in Dallas. So, the attribute of high-quality backlinks includes it being from a location where you are based. If you are based in Dallas, you should aim to get backlinks from websites that are about tech, news, and lifestyle and based in Dallas.

Authority

What else you should look for in a high-quality backlink? Website authority is another attribute of high-quality backlinks. Domain Ranking is a website’s score from a scale of 0 to 100, which shows its strength. However, this is not advisable to reach out to the only website that has high authority. This could only be a metric to start link prospecting, or else you would be losing on a lot of weak but potential-to-be-strong backlinks for your website. A website with 20 domain rankings can continually build authority over time, gives more power to your link on that page.

Traffic

Another attribute of a high-quality backlink is higher traffic from Google. Before reaching out to a website, you should be asking yourself if the website is getting consistent traffic from google. You target a decent website relevant to your website’s topic and context and have a higher authority, but the website’s organic traffic is diminishing overtime. It’s better not to get a link from such a website. This is primarily because Google might have penalized such a website for things like selling links. You probably wouldn’t want to website to be associated with a penalized website. In short, it advisable to check that the backlink site hasn’t been penalized and getting consistent organic traffic growth over time. 

How Google Evaluates Backlinks?

Google evaluates backlinks both from an algorithm standpoint and a manual standpoint. From the algorithm perspective, when Google web crawler finds a link, it uses the anchor text to determine the website’s relevance for a particular query. If it finds relevant to the website’s topic and context, it makes sense to them, and your website ranks. Suppose you get links on irrelevant websites that have no relation to your website. For instance, you have an English website about mobile app development, and you are getting a link on a Chinese fashion designing website. It is clearly off-topic and doesn’t make any sense. So, Google counts it as spam or low-quality backlink. If Google finds a sort of spam or link-selling things, a manual webspam analyst might get a spam report during a manual investigation, and then it can affect the ranking of your website.    

On the other hand, if your backlink is relevant to your website’s niche, has locational relevance, gets organic traffic, and has good authority, Google counts it as a high-quality backlink, and it helps your website rank better for a specific quarry or search keyword.