Backlinks are an essential component of search engine optimization (SEO) and play a crucial role in determining a website’s ranking on search engine results pages. As a result, they are the base of an industry that moves a lot of money, and that has brought plenty of options that you need to evaluate to decide what are the ones you really want.

What is a backlink?

In simple terms, a backlink is a link that leads to your website from another website. These links are valuable because they indicate to search engines that other websites consider your content to be authoritative and relevant.

As a result, backlinks can help to increase your website’s rankings, and therefore visibility, drive more traffic, and ultimately, boost your online business. In this blog post, we’ll explore the best practices to follow when using them to improve your website’s SEO. So, if you’re interested in learning more about backlinks, keep reading!

What kind of websites do you want to point to your site?

The websites you want to get backlinks from should be:

• High-authority websites: websites that are considered to be authoritative in your industry or niche can be very beneficial. These sites are often trusted by search engines and can pass on some of that trust to your website.
• Relevant websites: Backlinks from websites that are relevant to your industry or niche can help search engines understand the context of your website and its content.

Many site owners rely upon us to get backlinks for Spanish websites. These are some tips from our experience.

What is the typical mistake?

There are a lot of niches in which it is really hard to find relevant sites that at the same time are willing to add a link to your own site. As a consequence, many SEOs and online marketing rely too much in high-authority websites and don’t pay attention to relevancy.

Forget any of the two aspects: authority or relevancy is a mistake.

How do I know if a site is high-authority?

There are two main factors to consider a site as high-authority:

• Content quality: Websites that consistently produce high-quality, valuable content are more likely to be considered authoritative in their industry or niche.
• Traffic: Sites with high traffic usually are so because provide good information about a topic, so they can be considered authority.

However, content quality is subjective and traffic can be about many different topics, meaning that the site can have authority about different topics than the one interests you (yeah, the relevancy is important!).

Of course, the backlink profile is also important to evaluate a site’s authority. So yes, while you work in your own backlinks it will be good if you can check the backlinks of the sites you want to get links from.

To get the info the need faster and more conveniently, many SEOs rely in SEO tools to estimate the authority of a website. These tools usually have developed their own algorithm to rate the authoritativeness of the site. While these tools are useful, it is very important that you understand that the algorithm that interest you is Google’s one, and not the one from the tools. So the tools are just a way to have an idea, but they are far from being perfect.

These are the most common factors SEOs use to estimate the sites authority:

Moz Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a metric developed by Moz that measures the overall authority of a website on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the DA score, the more authoritative and trustworthy a website is considered to be by search engines.

The DA score is calculated using a complex algorithm that takes into account multiple factors, including the quality and quantity of backlinks pointing to a website, the age of the domain, and the overall content quality of the website. The algorithm is designed to mimic the way search engines evaluate websites, so a high DA score can generally be seen as a good indication that a website is likely to rank well in search results.

To calculate DA, Moz uses a machine learning model that looks at a wide range of factors related to a website’s backlink profile, such as the number of unique domains linking to the site, the relevance and authority of those domains, and the total number of links pointing to the site. Moz also takes into account the website’s overall content quality, user experience, and other on-page factors that can impact its authority and trustworthiness.

It’s important to note that DA is a relative metric, meaning that it’s most useful for comparing the authority of one website to another within the same niche or industry. A DA score of 50 might be considered high for a small, niche website, but it would be relatively low for a large, established website in a highly competitive industry. Additionally, DA is just one of many factors that search engines use to evaluate websites, so it should not be relied on as the sole determinant of a website’s search engine performance.

Ahrefs Domain Rating

Domain Rating (DR) is a metric developed by Ahrefs that also measures the strength and authority of a website’s backlink profile on a scale from 0 to 100. The higher the DR score, the more authoritative and trustworthy a website is considered to be by search engines.

Like other website authority metrics, Ahrefs calculates DR using a complex algorithm that takes into account multiple factors related to a website’s backlink profile. This includes the number of unique domains linking to the site, the relevance and authority of those domains, and the total number of backlinks pointing to the site. Ahrefs also takes into account the quality of the links pointing to a site, as well as other factors that can impact its authority and trustworthiness.

One of the unique features of Ahrefs’ DR metric is that it’s updated frequently, with new data added to the calculation on a daily basis. This means that DR scores can fluctuate over time as new backlinks are discovered or older backlinks are lost. It is worth to mention that, among other metrics, Ahrefs also makes an estimation of the organic traffic a site is getting.

What Are The Limitations of The Tools to Know a Site Authority?

The main limitation is that when generating backlinks you want a good site in Google eyes and nor Moz or Ahrefs are Google. Besides, in Spanishwriterpro we think that the Google’s algorithm is more complex than the ones used by this kind of SEO tools.

Both DA and DR are based primarily on a website’s backlink profile, with some additional factors (such as on-page optimization) taken into account. This means that they do not consider other important factors that can impact a website’s performance in search results, such as user experience, content quality, or technical SEO factors.

So never forget that you need to convince Google that your site is good, not Moz or Ahrefs.

There are also ways to trick the DA, DR or other metrics. Since many SEO use them as the main indicator for buying links, the webmasters and link-building agencies have learnt to improve the DA or DR artificially.

For example, if you rely on Ahrefs organic traffic as a factor to decide, you can find a site with a very high organic traffic in Ahrefs, that looks very cool at a first glance, but is not as good when you dig into it. In Ahrefs you can also check some keywords that the site is ranking, and a common way to inflate the Ahrefs organic traffic is ranking for useless keywords like phone number prefix.

Overall, while DA and DR can be helpful for evaluating the relative authority of websites, it’s important to remember that they are not perfect and should be used in conjunction with other metrics and factors when evaluating a website’s performance in search results.

Therefore, we come back to the beginning: relevancy + traffic, and although you can use the abovementioned SEO tools to make your life easier, you will still need to check in detail the sites and what is their traffic really about.