What Makes A Good Link?

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

ARTHUR: Welcome to another episode of the SEO show. As always, I'm here with Michael Costin. How are you doing today?

MICHAEL: I'm doing very well. I'm here with Arthur Fabik. You're going to ask me how I'm doing? I don't care how you're doing. What I really care about is what we're talking about today.

ARTHUR: Which is? One of your favorite topics?

MICHAEL: I think it's everyone in the SEO world's favorite topic. Do you? I wouldn't be so sure. Well, people, well, you know what? Not everyone in the SEO world, but generally speaking, when it comes to things like blog posts or podcasts or videos, link building always seems to do well. So we're talking about link building again today, but today we're talking about something we haven't really covered that in depth in the past, which is how to judge whether a link partner or a potential website is any good as a potential link. Mm-hmm. So, you excited? You ready to get stuck in?

ARTHUR: I'm so excited. Let's do this. Let's do this. Okay.

MICHAEL: Well, we've got nine ways to help you quickly determine whether a website would make a good link or not. And we're going to be ignoring metrics like tools, Ahrefs, SEMrush, all that, you know, DA, DR, TF, all that stuff. Right. Because like they're just metrics that those tools have come up with. We're going to explain how you can check out a site and assess it without relying on those things. Cool. All right. Let's do it.

ARTHUR: Ready to jump in. I'm ready to jump in. Do you want me to go with the first one? Why not? You can do the first one. So. has Google Visibility itself. Maybe I should wear that a bit better. So what you want to do is make, what you want to make sure is that the website that you're approaching to get a link from has visibility itself. So essentially make sure that it's ranking for a number of different keywords. Make sure that it's ranking for the right keywords based on, I guess, the type of website that it is. So if you're looking at a, let's say a travel website, you'd expect it to rank for a variety of different travel keywords. Obviously the higher their rank, the better. That means that Google sees that site as an authority. It means that the site is indexed, that it has been penalized and that it's getting traffic. Yeah. So that's very, very important.

MICHAEL: I would say it's the, the number one factor. Yeah. Cause like Google's already rewarding that site. That site is pleasing to Google. Pleasing. So, um, yeah, getting, getting a link from it is probably going to be a good thing.

ARTHUR: Yeah, definitely. And then, you know, you can use different tools like Ahrefs. I know we said we weren't going to talk about tools, but- We can talk about tools.

MICHAEL: It's just the metrics. You know, DR30 is a good link. Like that's too basic.

ARTHUR: So if you use like Ahrefs, you can have a look at the organic visibility chart, have a look at how many keywords are ranking and, you know, positions one to three, page one, and then assess from there. If they've got a fair few keywords ranking and the, I guess the keywords are relevant to the site, then, you know, it's a good starting point.

MICHAEL: And then the next one, the next point on that is sort of ties into that one, which is it has organic traffic, but there's a rankings, but those rankings should be driving traffic. And importantly, it should be from relevant countries. So again, you can use Ahrefs, SEMrush, something like that to get a feel for how much traffic it has. And obviously the more organic traffic, the better. Conversely, you know, if it has very little traffic, that's a red flag because it's saying that Google's not really rewarding this site. You know, Google, if you think about what Google wants, it wants to send its users to a good experience. Yeah. And if it's not sending much traffic to this site, then that's a red flag.

ARTHUR: Well, essentially just means they don't have keywords ranking high enough to get organic traffic.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So there's two points high or good enough keywords. They might run off keywords. Exactly. Yeah. The other one is traffic, like the countries, the traffic comes from. So obviously in our world, traffic from native English speaking markets like Australia, US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, that sort of stuff, good. But sometimes a site will have like a ton of traffic in AHS and then you go and look at where it's coming from and it might be from other countries that are not really English speaking and might be easier to rank in. And, you know, there's a lot of people that sell links that are trying to fudge the numbers. So they know that traffic is a good thing and they might be ranking junk articles in countries that are of no use really in terms of the traffic. So that would be one thing. But then also looking at the keywords themselves that are driving the traffic. Because what some sites do, again, link people selling links have cottoned on to the sort of metrics that people are looking at in the SEO world. And they know that traffic's important. So what some sites will do is go and try and rank for really high volume searches, but low competition. So it might be like a software error code or something like that. Yes. I'll throw up an article on that. And then Ahrefs says, well, look, it ranks for this search term that has 400,000 searches a month. Yeah. Look at all the traffic this site gets, but it's really worthless. So the keywords need to be relevant and on the theme of the site or the topic of the site.

ARTHUR: Yeah. I guess to do that kind of high level research, you really do need to invest in something like Ahrefs because it's too hard to do manually.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Like, yeah, absolutely. Like if you're serious about SEO, one of Ahrefs or SEMrush, SEMrush.

ARTHUR: We're not going through this again.

MICHAEL: Call it what you want to call it. I say potato, you say potato, but you need one of them. So we're just assuming that you have the ability to buy one of those tools, which is relatively inexpensive. Yeah. All right. What's the next one?

ARTHUR: Point three. Point three. So does the site have a decent number of referring domains? So essentially pretty simple. The more referring domains, unique referring domains pointing to that site, the better. That just means that, you know, if they start losing referring domains over time, it's not going to affect your domain rating, which is not what we wanted to talk about, but essentially that's what, how it kind of works.

MICHAEL: Yeah, which basically means if your site, you get a link from a site that has 10 referring domains, then five drop off, it's lost half its juice that it was sending to you. So you want a site that has enough volume of referring domains that it's gonna be a quality link foreseeably for a long, foreseeably? Foreseeably, yeah. I think that's a word for a long time into the future. It is a word, yeah. Just felt weird to say.

ARTHUR: Yeah. It sounded weird too, but.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But anyway, decent number of referring domains. And then let's chat about domains a bit more or backlinks because the point four we have here is the backlink profile of the site itself should not be spammy. It should be good, a good looking backlink profile. So what are we talking? Things like, you know, the domain is linking to them. We want quality ones there, like strong publications, you know, high DR, again, coming back to DR, but it's a good way of quickly assessing the quality of a link in a potential linking partner's backlink profile. Try saying that 10 times fast. We don't want to see lots of like directory free sites, scraper sites, that sort of stuff. You want to see real sites in their backlink profile.

ARTHUR: Yeah, absolutely.

MICHAEL: Cool, cool. What else? What else can we do to look at backlink profiles and make sure they're not spammy?

ARTHUR: or you can also look at the anchor text and make sure that it's not spammy. So making sure that it appears natural, again, you need to use Ahrefs, but looking at what other people are linking to the website with. So you'd assume that, you know, if a site is geared towards one certain topic, you should see anchors that are relevant to that topic. If you start seeing anchors that are completely irrelevant, then that might be a red flag. Alternatively, if you start seeing things like, you know, Viagra or random like, Crypto. Crypto, things like that. Definitely steer clear because yeah, you're going to run into trouble.

MICHAEL: Even just totally over-optimized anchor texts. Like if they're a home construction site for some reason, you're getting a link from that and their backlink profiles, 40% of that means that they've probably been doing dodgy SEO. And at some point that site's likely to get a penalty and, You know, at best it's just going to be discounted by Google, at worst it can hurt your site. Same sort of principles at play when you're assessing the quality of your own site, I guess. You should be putting them into practice when you're looking at the backlink profile for a potential linking partner.

ARTHUR: Yeah. Cool. The other thing that would be TLDs. So making sure that they're coming from English speaking countries, .com, .com.au, .co.uk, I guess, depending on what you're looking for, but those would be the three main ones.

MICHAEL: .net. .net, yeah. Even sometimes like .co's now, .io's, .ai's. Like let's say in Australia, if we can get a .com.au TLD, top level domain, That's good, you know, you want, they're really sort of strong signals if you're trying to rank in Australia. So you might accept a site that has less traffic or is a little bit, I guess, lower quality in other areas if it's a .com.au because there's not as many .com.aus in you, you know. Yeah. But like, you don't need to focus on that. We sort of run into this sometimes with clients where people will be fixated on wanting .com.au's when .com's .net's. All the time.

ARTHUR: Yeah, they're fine.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ARTHUR: The problem is there isn't that many .com.au blogs and websites out there that are willing to link back a lot of the time. So it is a lot harder, costs a lot more, and the metrics are never as good as just regular .com sites. So although it is probably good in some situations, I guess the cost to benefit ratio just isn't there for most clients.

MICHAEL: And then if you become too fixated on that, that's when you end up working with people that will use a PBN or something, you know, like a .com.au PBN. Sure, you're getting the TRDs, but they're pretty junky links. Yeah. All right, well, a lot of the stuff we've just covered there, right, is looking at using tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush to have a look at, you know, links and referring domains and anchor text and all that. Yep. But there is other stuff you can do from a visual pass over. So there's the tool support and then the visual. So first and foremost, when you look at the site, does the topic of it make sense? Because what you'll find is sometimes people will just buy an old expired domain that's got like a weird name so it might be like like electronic, electronica max or something. Cause that was a brand. And then they try and convert electronica max into like a cover everything blog where it has topics on everything.

ARTHUR: And it just looks like they've done exactly what they'd be like something like save to data. And then it would just be like some sort of generic, you're like a general site that covers every single topic under the sun. And if, yeah, you can definitely tell that that's been repurposed to sell links.

MICHAEL: And then I guess also the topic should make sense in the context of your site and what you do and what you are trying to rank for. So if you're a home construction focused business, getting links from DIY construction, like architecture, that sort of stuff makes sense. Getting links from a X sailing club site, that's just been, you know, a new website has been bought on it because someone bought that domain probably doesn't make sense. So first and foremost, what's the topic of the site?

ARTHUR: Would you avoid sites like general sites like that or mummy blogs? Because mummy blogs essentially would cover every topic under the sun for that very reason, because then you can approach them no matter what, I guess.

MICHAEL: I wouldn't. I wouldn't. If that's, if that site has been created from the ground up like that. Yeah. But when you go, we've got a point later and checking out like way back machine to look at it, if you can see that it's been something else in the past and then something else, and then it's just come back to life. excuse me, as one of those catch all sites, then probably would sort of, sometimes you can go with them because they're working. They have tons of traffic. That's it. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Cause those sites generally have good metrics. They'll have a very high DR, a lot of sites linking to them. They would have a lot of keywords appearing in top positions and actually get legitimate traffic. So although they are kind of, you know, general targeting different topics, You know, the metrics kind of are on point, so.

MICHAEL: Yeah, so traffic invisibility, if they're strong, probably would. And depends if you've exhausted all the other options that you, you know, if there's better options.

ARTHUR: Let's face it, there isn't that many sites for mining or like, you know, there's, certain verticals and clients that we work with where it's difficult to find a site or blog that's just specific to that one area. So a lot of the time you do have to reach out to those types of sites which cover, like you said, a catch-all site that covers several different verticals. I almost knocked the camera over there.

MICHAEL: That would have been a disaster for our loyal YouTube viewers. By the way, this is on YouTube for people listening. We're sort of at 250 odd subscribers now, I think it is. On YouTube? We're massive. On YouTube? Around that. Oh, cool. Anyway, let's go on to the next point, which is it needs to pass a visual inspection. So this is a big one. What are you looking at when you're looking at a visual inspection?

ARTHUR: I wish we could, maybe we can overlay like a site. We can on the YouTube. Yeah, let's do that. Because once you see like a, I guess a red flag site, they all look the same. So I guess the first thing would be the theme. So sites that have a very basic kind of, what would you call it? Like a very standard theme, they're the ones to look out for. So it's hard to kind of explain that once you see it, you can't unsee it. They're just super basic with just a very regular header, just like a basic news site. No kind of like customization. Yeah. Just yeah.

MICHAEL: Like the logo and branding aren't sort of on point. Like they're just banged together, crappy logo, crappy font.

ARTHUR: Low resolution logo, like very poorly made. Yep. Like you said, crappy fonts. stock images just littered across the site. Every image is just a stock image.

MICHAEL: Even the posts, right? Like let's say the homepage, it's just a whole bunch of posts with the title and the featured image, but no like little blurb. It's not like nice to use. It's just a big like list of posts.

ARTHUR: If we can overlay like a screenshot of one in this video, let's do it. Because maybe just a couple of examples, just so you can see the trend. And if you look at the homepage, you'll notice that there is just, you know, random topic after topic. Often crypto, marijuana, CBD oils.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And then next thing it would be like the commercial commercial tiling must hat must nose or something alongside the thing about foreign exchange trading.

ARTHUR: Like the most random things you can think of. Not even categorized, just bang on the homepage.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah. The other one is they'll often, they won't have an about page or a contact page or any sort of idea of who's behind the site. You know, most real sites, you can sort of find out who's running it. Editors, whatever. Like, yeah. And then the posts themselves, like how are they formatted? Like a lot of the time, these big PBN sort of junk sites will just publish a wall of text. They probably don't even embed any images in the posts and stuff. And it's just, Has comments turned on, but no comments left on any posts. It's just really, no social interaction at all.

ARTHUR: No likes, no nothing. It's just, yeah.

MICHAEL: no links to social profiles at all. Like they don't have Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever.

ARTHUR: Or if they do, they have fake, fake followers and absolutely no, you know, no posts, no interaction. Cause some of them do, some of them do go to the effort to create a Facebook page, which has like, you know, 10,000 likes, but then nothing, it's just barren basically.

MICHAEL: So, but again, coming back to the point before about the topic of the site, making sense. we're not totally saying that you absolutely have to discount a site if it has social profiles and they're all fake followers. Like if that site is ranking really well in Google and getting a lot of traffic and it does make sense from, I guess, to link to you, then maybe you would go with that and ignore the fact that it's social profiles are trash.

ARTHUR: Also comes down to budget as well. Like if you've got a smaller link building budget and those links are cheaper, then

MICHAEL: Why not? Yeah. And as we've spoken about in previous episodes, like these days, Google really is tending to ignore links. It doesn't like rather than penalize sites.

ARTHUR: So, um, worst case scenario, it's just won't pass any value to your site. You might go backwards cause you have less links pointing to your domain, but unlikely that you're going to get. Lock on wood, touch wood, penalized.

MICHAEL: Yeah. But like, let's say you're assessing hundreds of link options in a month and you're only choosing a few, then try and do everything we're saying here first and then casting that a bit wider when you need to. Yeah. So we've got two more points here. The content itself, does it make sense? Does what it's linking to make sense? Sort of ties into what we've covered there, but sometimes you'll find on these sites, you read the first paragraph of an article and it wants to put you to sleep, or it's just so painfully written that your eyes glaze over and you don't read anymore. Because they're using either AI content or just really, really cheap, you know, like text broker articles that cost them a couple of bucks for, you know, a 500 word article. And they've clearly been written with no care as to whether a human ever reads it or not, because it's just there for Google. And then the links would be shoehorned in. So it might be talking about tiling, you know, how to clean grout off tiles or whatever. And then in the middle of it, it has like best tiler North Sydney or something jammed in. So it just makes no sense. And then.

ARTHUR: Well, that's not even that bad of an example. I remember seeing, you know, some sites would talk about you know, babies, like what to do when you have a new baby. And then it would link it to a family law because, you know, so it's like, you know, the way that they've come to that is you've got a baby, you've got a family, you know, you might need a family lawyer. So yeah, at some point, hopefully not immediately having a baby, but just like general, very general kind of posts that aren't really about anything. And then just a link to something super specific that doesn't make sense at all.

MICHAEL: Yeah. And then all the other, let's say related posts at the end of the page are about, as we said before, all the random topics. Like stay away from that stuff. I would, you know, if it really looks that obvious, even if the metrics are good, you probably, as we said, stay away from it and focus on the ones that pass all of this stuff first. The last thing we like to do is look at Wayback Machine. So that's pretty cool because it's like a snapshot in time of that website. So you can plug any… It's like a time machine. Yeah, it's a Wayback Machine, I guess. So it's at, what is it? Archive.org, I think is one domain. There's probably WaybackMachine.com or something. I'm not sure, but… You can go there, type a domain name into it, and this tool goes and crawls websites and keeps them in a database, a snapshot of what they look like. And you can go back and look through that database. So any website you can check in. And if you see that in the past it used to be a software company and then it's gone out of business and it was like a domain registrar holding page for a couple of years and then all of a sudden came back to life as like a random blog. That can be a sign that it's not the best linking partner. Yeah, definitely. Again, though, as we've said before, if that site has a ton of traffic and visibility and stuff, that's not a. I guess it's not a immediate no, but if you have seen in the past that it was maybe a like doorway junk page, like Nike Air Max or Viagra or whatever, in between being like a legitimate site and then a new reborn blog, you'd probably ignore it. Like the minute you see any sign of spam or shady stuff in its past, just discount it.

ARTHUR: How long before would you say a domain was repurposed? Would that be an issue? So I'm thinking, let's just say someone bought a domain that was registered in 2003 and it was a completely irrelevant site, but then someone bought that domain in 2013. And for the last 10 years, it's been something completely different.

MICHAEL: For me personally, if I've seen that it has spam, like clear cut spam, I just wouldn't bother with it. Okay. Um, if it was like one thing and it has not been anything for years, it was a domain like registrar holding page. And then it suddenly came back to life. If it's got the organic traffic and the visibility and looks okay, then I wouldn't be discounting it. But for me, the spam in there, like there's just so many other options out there that it's better to go with them. Mm. This stuff takes time though as well. Like there are, yes, there's all sorts of different tools you can use. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. These aren't even everything we do. Like we do of course, look at things like TFDR, DA, all that sort of stuff as well.

ARTHUR: But well, I think, you know, going to the visual inspection point, I think now we're pretty good at being able to pick up sites, which are trash. Yeah. Straight away. You can just pick up the signals and you know, little things to know not to even waste your time investigating.

MICHAEL: Yeah. So. But starting, let's say you'd never done it before. You're probably looking at a good 20, 25 minutes per site, you know, while you're figuring it all out. So, um, yeah, but I think you definitely should be doing it. If you're doing any form of link building, you want to be keeping a level of quality control on the types of sites you're reaching out to. Definitely. All right. Well, that is the way we go about assessing a quality link option from a bad link option. Hopefully that helps. Go have some fun assessing sites. Sign up to Ahrefs. Sign up to Ahrefs if you haven't already.

ARTHUR: Use the free trial if they have one. I'm pretty sure they would.

MICHAEL: I know they've changed their pricing lately and they seem to have gone more stingy. So, um, I'm sure they have some sort of free, I think they have like a $1 trial for seven days or something or $7. That's how they get you. Yeah.

ARTHUR: Your credit card details in and then, yeah. And then forget about it.

MICHAEL: And then you get charged every month. It happens to everyone. Yeah. But anyway, hopefully you enjoyed that. We will be back with another episode of the SEO next week, but until then happy SEOing. Happy SEOing.

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