There are many ways to find websites for link building. However, one should never build backlinks on a website without analyzing first whether the website is good for link building or not. Even, if your competitors are using the website for link building doesn’t mean that the website is good for link building.
In this article, we’ll show you how you can analyze if a site is good for link building.
The relevance of the Website
Before going into the detailed analysis of a website that you are targeting for link building, it’s important to check the relevance of the site. Is the website relevant enough to be considered for link building? The reason is that building a backlink from a good website that isn’t related to your website in any way isn’t helpful for SEO. For example, a backlink from a private jet charter website to a website that describes dental procedures would be useless.
Google wants to ensure that searchers get the best user experience. Therefore, it keeps monitoring the relevance of the backlinks.
Check the Website’s SEO Metrics
The quality of a website can be analyzed by SEO metrics. Some important metrics that should be checked when analyzing a website for quality are:
Spam Score
Moz provides this metric and SEO experts can use it to determine the risk of banning/penalization by the search engine. If the spam score of a website is above five, it means that the website has been penalized by Google and won’t be good for link building.
PageRank
Google calculates PageRank based on the quality and number of links that point to a particular web page. The PageRank of the homepage of a website can provide an idea of the strength of the website. The Google Toolbar can be used to find the PageRank of a web page.
Domain Authority
This is the most important metric according to Alex from Healthy Links. Domain authority, calculated by Moz, predicts a website’s or domain’s ability to rank in Google and other search engines. A high score of domain authority means that a website has a good potential to rank well in search engines. If you get links from strong domains, you’ll get more strength to your website which will help improve your website’s ranking in search engines.
Analyze the Engagement of Readers with the Posts of a Website
If you wish to build backlinks through guest blogging, you must determine how active the audience of the website you’re targeting is. Healthy Links recommends checking the comments on the posts or interactions through social media to determine the engagement of the readers with the website. When the audience is active, it means that the website can be good for link building.
Check the Frequency of New Content
There are many websites that aren’t active on the internet. If the webmaster of a website has abandoned their site, it won’t be useful for link building. Therefore, it is important to check how frequently a website publishes new content to determine whether the site is active.
The blog of a website can be used to determine if the site is active. If one or two posts are published every two to three weeks, it means that the website is active and can be good for link building. If nothing new has been posted on the website for two to three months, it means that it isn’t active and isn’t qualified for link building.
Does the Website Rank for its Own Name?
It is important to check if the website you are targeting for link building ranks for its own name. Sites that don’t rank in the first position of the search engine results for their own name aren’t reputable in the eyes of search engines. They may have been penalized by Google. You can check whether the site is penalized by Google by the spam score metric as discussed earlier. If the website isn’t anywhere on the first page for its own name, it won’t help your SEO from link building in any way.
By analyzing a website through the tests highlighted above, you can determine if the site is good for link building.
