Backlink Analysis

Search engines assess the quality and profile of backlinks to algorithmically assess the quality and trust of your website.  This data plays a key factor in their decision about which sites should rank and at which position.

We work in partnership with Majestic SEO, the largest independent provider of who links to whom on the web.  We have been working together for over 10 years and believe their combination of fresh link data with our additional crawling, verification, categorisation and analysis gives you an unparalleled link data source.

A backlink (also known as an inbound link) is a link from another website to your website.   Backlinks are important because they are one of the main factors that search engines use to rank websites in their search engine results pages (SERP).

A good backlink is a backlink that comes from a high-quality and reputable website.  A high-quality website is a website that is respected by other websites and has a high Google PageRank.  The SEO industry has developed its own set of metrics to assess the strength and quality of a backlink.  You will often hear terms such as Domain Authority, Page Authority, Trust and Citation Flow (amongst others) - please remember these are industry constructs and not Google’s.

Authoritas uses two metrics to assess backlink quality – Influence and Relevance.

Influence measures the domain’s popularity on the internet by analysing its link profile.

Relevance measures whether the content on the linking page is topically related and therefore relevant to you.

We call backlinks with high Influence and high Relevance scores ‘Golden Links’.

Backlinks with low Influence and high Relevance scores are labelled as ‘Niche Links’.

Backlinks with high Influence and low Relevance scores are labelled as ‘Authority Links’.

Backlinks with low Influence and low Relevance scores are labelled as ‘Toxic Links’.

Every website will have a mix of all 4 types of links.
 
Clearly, you want more Golden Links to key landing pages than your competitors.  Given a choice, we prefer Niche Links over Authority Links as they are more likely to bring relevant traffic and motivated buyers.

Links from questionable sources are treated as untrusted by Google and other search engines and pose the risk of a significant reduction in rank.  Simply use any of the advanced filters to check your backlink profile. For example, you may want to find backlinks with a low relevance and low influence score, or backlinks from countries you don’t do business in, or links with irrelevant anchor text.

Links from questionable sources are treated as untrusted by Google and other search engines and pose the risk of a significant reduction in rank.  Simply use any of the advanced filters to check your backlink profile. For example, you may want to find backlinks with a low relevance and low influence score, or backlinks from countries you don’t do business in, or links with irrelevant anchor text.

Link data can also be a valuable tool for identifying bloggers and writers to reach out to when promoting content during campaigns.  Managing the links to your website is still one of the biggest factors in improving visibility, and you can easily identify influential, relevant and authoritative sources, discover who’s linking to your competitors, and see who in your industry has been publishing the content that attracts the most backlinks. This information can be used to build valuable new links, ultimately driving more traffic to your own sites.

A backlink profile is a compilation of all of the backlinks that a website has. A website's backlink profile can be used to measure its online authority and popularity.

The backlink profile measures the quantity and quality of backlinks to your website.