Getting High Quality Backlinks for Sustainable Rankings

Everyone wants a large, robust backlink profile because being more connected with other sites makes it quicker for crawlers to find you. However, having a large quantity of backlinks is not always a good thing if the backlinks come from low-quality or irrelevant sources.

While it is true that being more connected helps your site get discovered faster, it does not help you have long lasting rankings. The types of sites backlinking to your site influence sustainable rankings.

Backlinks from relevant, trustworthy and authoritative sites will help increase your rankings for a long period of time. Whereas if you are being linked from a lot of low-quality and spammy sites, you may see a short boost in rankings, but eventually those ranking will stagnant, or even worse, but you may actually see them drop.

Gaining high-quality links important for your site's health 

Having high-quality websites linking to you means you'll get their link juice. Link juice is the credibility and trust that one site passes on to another site in the form of backlinks. It is important to gain backlinks that can pass this link juice onto your site so that you can rise positions within the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Low-quality and spammy sites do not have that credibility, so they may have little to no link juice to pass on. In fact, being associated with too many spammy sites may make search engines think you're up to something fishy, like buying your backlinks link to my link earning article. This is a black-hat SEO technique that will lead to you being penalized and actually dropping positions in the SERPs.

Determining high-quality backlinks for your market

High-quality quality backlinks come from relevant, trustworthy searches.  Search engines want to give searchers exactly what they're looking for and have the searchers trust the results. Therefore, search engines put a lot of emphasis on the relevance of  the sites linking to you.

To determine if a linking site is relevant to you, ask yourself:

• Does the site linking to me have related content?
• Is it related to my business?
• Is it a local site talking about my local service?

Search engines take into consideration more than simply the authority of the site linking to you. They look at everything surrounding the link including its content, relevance of the page, and relevance of the website as a whole.

Understanding which links are high-quality

 
Once you decide a link is relevant, the next step is to figure out the site's authority. You should monitor the trust flow and citation flow, and the trust ratio (trust flow/citation flow). All of this is provided by Majestic, our backlinks partner.

Determine if the site linking to you is of high, medium or low quality by these numbers:

• High Quality
  • Trust flow is >15
  • Trust flow > Citation flow  (Trust ratio is above 1)
  • Trust Ratio is >1
• Medium Quality
  • Trust flow ≤ Citation flow, but Trust flow > 2x Citation flow (Trust ratio is above .5)
  • Trust flow > 15
  • Trust Flow >10 and <15
• Low Quality
  • Trust flow = 2x Citation flow (Trust ratio is below .5)
  • Trust flow >15
  • Trust Flow >10 and <15
  • Trust Flow < 10

However, Unamo SEO makes this easy for you by simply telling you if a link is high, medium or low quality.