What is a Quality Link?
Most importantly, a quality link is NOT from a site known for spamming. But there are many degrees of quality. Here are some potential attributes of a quality link:
- Comes from a trusted domain
- Comes from a page that is topically relevant to your page
- Uses your target keywords in the anchor text
A Quick Word on Anchor Text
If you’re trying to rank for a specific keyword, you want to have inbound links using those keywords as anchor text. However, keep in mind the fact that a “natural” link profile will not have optimized anchor text in every single link. Some links will have your company or website name as the anchor text. Some links might say “click here” or “get [product name] from [company name].”
So make sure you get some generic anchor text for the destination page as well as links with anchor text that uses variations of the target keyword.
- Comes from a page that is popular and well-ranked in the search engines
- Comes from a page that is recently and regularly indexed by the search engines (hint: check its Google cache date)
- Isn’t “nofollowed”
- Is a link that will be difficult for competitors to duplicate
- Is a link that will not only give you SEO value, but will also send traffic to your website
Let me be perfectly clear: 99% of the links you acquire will NOT have all of these attributes, but they should have as many of them as possible. If CNN or the New York Times wants to link to your site with the word “here” as anchor text, don’t decline the offer! That’s still a quality link. Not only will it help with SEO because of their domain authority, but it will send a boatload of traffic too. Also, just because a page doesn’t appear to have any Page Rank or a lot of backlinks, don’t dismiss it as worthless – if it’s very relevant to your page and ranks well in Google for your keywords, then it’s still a quality link.
