Introduction

Google values the credibility of the website more for search engine ranking, as its ultimate goal is to provide relevant results for the users. Backlinks to your site act as a vote of confidence which helps you gain Google’s trust. You can increase the reliability score of your domain by acquiring high-quality incoming links. Thus, link building is an essential strategy for search engine optimization.

You need to build inbound links in your site to outrank your niche competitors. One of many ways to gain backlinks is by outreaching niche-relevant sites for link building. Another method is contextual link building which is done by inserting backlinks or inbound links within an article or blog. This link building technique is more effective, as contextual links strengthen your SERP ranking by passing authority to your website. 

If your website has no incoming links, google finds it challenging to rank on the search results page. You need more good backlinks to rank your domain higher than the competitors. By verifying the link metrics of your inbound links, you can improve the success rate of link building. Several tools are available to assist you in obtaining and monitoring efficient backlinks. In this article, Let us see some of the crucial link building metrics and tools.

Link Metric Tools

Link metrics are the measurements associated with links to determine a website’s authority, relevancy and trustworthiness. Some of the metrics are:

• Domain authority
• Number of inbound links
• Anchor text
• Page authority
• Web page rank
• Destination of the backlinks
• Linking root domains
• Linking page relevancy

You can use specific tools with these link metric features to analyse the backlink profile. They are:

1. Moz

Moz is a top software which has various features to enhance your site’s organic traffic and Google ranking. It gives you a complete report of the link metrics to get necessary insights. 

#Domain Authority (DA) Score

Moz includes an essential link metric score called Domain authority, which helps to evaluate your website’s strength. It analyses your site’s performance in google search results and reports on a scale of 1 to 100. The domain authority score will be high if your site has many good quality and niche-relevant incoming links. And you will get a low DA score if your domain has less number of backlinks.

Also, you can verify the domain authority level of your site by using Moz’s free SEO tool called MozBar or by pasting the site’s URL into Moz link explorer. 

# Linking Root Domains

The total number of distinct backlinks in your website obtained from root domains is known as linking root domains. For instance, if a website is linking with many pages or contents in your domain, the linking root domain count is one. In this metric, the raw number of inbound links is not considered, and only links from unique domains will be taken into account.

Sometimes getting many backlinks from the same website may look spammy and reduce your site’s credibility. Thus google considers linking root domains value acts as a powerful signal as it indicates the actual reliability of a site.

#Page Authority (PA)

Page Authority metric in Moz shows the efficiency of a particular page in your site to rank on google SERP. The PA score is measured based on many factors like Mozscape web index, number of inbound links etc. You can easily rank a specific web page of your site on top of google search results if it has a high PA level. Also, Moz uses a machine learning algorithm that changes according to the data fed into it to evaluate the page authority value. 

2. Ahrefs

Ahrefs is one of the best SEO tools, as it crawls your website to collect data for analysing backlinks. The tool helps in the optimization of your website and boosts its online visibility. 

# Domain Rating

Domain rating is introduced to know the quality of your site’s backlink profile on a scale of 0 to 100. This metric indicates the ability of your site to appear in the SERP ranking. DR verifies the relevancy of backlinks and provides a report based on traffic on your site. 

# Referring Domain

In Ahrefs, the referring domain feature lets you see the sites linking back to your website or a specific web page or blog. Insert your website URL in the tool and select domain mode to see your referring domains. You can also check the number of backlinks obtained from the same website by clicking Links to the target column. This helps you check whether a website is already linked with you while finding new prospects for inbound links.

Using this tool, you can also analyse your competitor’s backlink profile. Paste your competitor site’s URL in the tool to get the domain rating, Ahrefs rank, and do-follow links of their referring domains. From the result, note the highly authoritative sites, websites offering do-follow links, and sites with a good popularity in your niche. You can use this data to find more relevant link building opportunities for your website. 

#URL Rating

URL rating calculates the backlink profile of a specific page in your website on a logarithmic level of 100. This metric is the same as domain rating but at the web page level. For measurement, it takes both internal and outbound links of your site into consideration, but each holds different values. To calculate the URL rating, Ahrefs uses Google’s Pagerank method. The factors followed by the tool for evaluating this metric are:

• Using a damping factor
• Links between the pages of your site
• Checking the “nofollow” attributes
• By crawling the web pages deeply

The URL rating is an essential ranking factor in the google search engine. You can place your web pages on top of search result ranking if it has a high UR score. 

3. Semrush

Semrush is an all-in-one link building tool that helps to check the backlinks’ domain authority and toxicity score. The tools enhance the growth of your site by offering keyword tactics and performing SEO audits. 

# Domain Authority

Semrush offers the domain authority score to indicate the SEO performance of your domain. The tool calculates the authority and reliability of your website, which conveys the overall quality on a scale of 0 to 100. To find the DA score on Semrush, place your domain or web page URL on the Backlink Analytics or Domain overview feature. Semrush provides accurate measurements using specific machine learning and neural networks for calculation. The following are the steps involved in determining the domain authority score:

Step 1: Semrush’s initial algorithm analyses credible and popular websites on the internet to understand their google ranking. It uses factors like inbound link data, site traffic, and organic search stats for evaluating these websites.

Step 2: The following algorithm uses incoming link data to verify whether the site’s authority increases or decreases while link building. The link metrics for measuring domain authority level are:

• The number of incoming links on the site
• The number of domains that are linked back to the website
• Authority of each referring site
• The number of referring IPs directed to the site
• Nofollow vs follow links incoming to the site ( internal links)
• Nofollow vs follow links outgoing from the site ( external links)
• The number of referring subnetworks pointing to the website
• The number of external links from each referring site

You can find sites with a good backlink profile using domain authority scores for successful link building. The metric has more benefits on the SEO of your website, some of them are:

• DA score is used to verify the websites you want to buy
• It helps to verify the backlink profile of link building prospects
• You can analyse your competitor’s domains using DA
• To track your progress in SEO over some time
• Using the DA score, you can avoid negative SEO

# Overall Toxicity Score

In Semrush, you can find all toxic inbound links pointing to your site using its backlink audit tool. The tool sorts these links based on their toxicity score, which is calculated by 50+ metrics. These parameters decide a backlink’s harmfulness, affecting your site’s authority. 

You can see the inbound links with high toxicity scores on the first page of the report. Add the links with low toxicity scores to your whitelist so that you can keep them on your domain. Include the backlinks with high toxic scores to your disavow list. This list is forwarded to google to remove the toxic links from your site. 

Likewise, Semrush offers toxic marker filters to shortlist your audited inbound links. For instance, you can use this filter to get a result of backlinks from domains with spam TLDs on your site. To find the broken incoming links on your website, you can use the Target URL Error filter feature. 

Common Link Metrics For Effective Link Building

Anchor Text

The clickable form of text in a hyperlink to link the web pages within a site or with different domains is called anchor text or link text. Anchor texts in a backlink give a short description of the linked content. Google penalises the sites which do not follow its guidelines for anchor text. Therefore you have to choose the best anchor texts for link building of  your website to gain the trust of Google. Using irrelevant text for inbound links will make them look like artificial ones.

Google algorithm considers both anchor text and its surrounding words to check whether the backlink is related to your site or not. Lack of anchor text’s niche relevance may lead your site to get penalties from the search engine. 

Follow Vs No-Follow Links

Follow links are backlinks that connect your domain with another and let the google bots crawl to analyze the sites. It allows the linked sites to pass link equity which is helpful in ranking your site on the search engine result page. 

No-follow links have an attribute called rel=” nofollow” to indicate the google spiders. These links do not pass any link value as it stops the website crawlers from scanning them. Thus no-follow links have zero impact on the position of your website in the google search engine. 

Page Strength

Page strength enables you to know the online visibility of a page in your domain and its potential to rank on google search results. It helps you to calculate the number of backlinks and mentions of your web page and its popularity on the internet. You can determine the page strength score using following points:

• Backlinks in your website
• Age of your site
• Percentage of internal links
• Incoming links pointing to the full URL of your website
• Ranking of your domain in Alexa 
• Inbound links from sites with .gov TLDs
• Inbound links from sites with .edu TLDs
• Links to your domain in Wikipedia
• Search result data for your site’s URL search
• The score of your site and its full URL in Google Pagerank 
• Visibility of your domain name on the internet

Link Quantity

Link quantity is the metric to know the number of incoming links pointing to your website. But for ranking your domain on the search result page, google considers the quality of backlinks rather than quantity.

Position Of Backlinks 

The position of backlinks in your site is vital as it helps to know the link’s significance. Inbound links placed at the start of the main content are seen as more valuable ones. And the low-value backlinks are generally placed at the bottom of the content. 

Age Of Referring Domain

You can determine the reliability and authority of a site using the age of backlinks. If your domain contains many good-quality backlinks which are linked there for an extended period, the credibility of the site will increase. 

Relevancy Of The Backlink

Link relevance is a metric to determine whether the incoming link is related to your niche or not. Only the backlinks acquired from niche-relevant sites add value to your domain’s ranking in the google search engine. Irrelevant inbound links are considered spammy and may reduce your website’s trustworthiness. 

Types Of Backlinks

Backlinks are the primary factor for search engine optimization of your domain. There are several types of backlinks which can improve the authority of your site. For example, you can obtain editorial backlinks when other sites like the contents on your site and link back willingly. Another kind is backlinks from Private Blog Networks, which have a group of authoritative sites. To get top ranking on google, you can try to build high DA PBN backlinks as it passes more link juice from multiple sites. Guest post links are obtained by offering to write guest articles on other sites. Also, inbound links from webinars, blog or forum comment sections and an article’s author bio are valuable in link building.

Some kinds of backlinks may harm your site and its online growth. So it’s vital to ensure the quality of a site before choosing them for link building. Use only do-follow backlinks to get maximum benefits for your website.  

Conclusion

To achieve the targeted revenue on your website, you need more traffic. Link building is an intelligent way to increase the number of customers for your site and to create brand awareness. You can enhance the quality of backlinks pointing to your site with good link metrics. Using these metrics, you can analyze your competitor’s site and find their linked domains. This helps you to plan perfect backlink strategies for outranking them in google. Simultaneously, the link metrics enable you to see the domain strength of a website in your niche to pick them for link building. 

Tools like Majestic offer metrics called trust flow and topical trust flow to determine the trustworthiness of a domain. Through this, you can find trustable websites for building backlinks to your site. To compare the citation flow, number of backlinks, trust flow etc between two domains you can use the link profile fight feature on the Majestic tool. Hence, you can improve your site’s SEO performance by using the link metrics and tools mentioned in the article.