While no one knows for sure how Google measures the value of each backlink, there are several indicators that are generally accepted as true by the SEO community.
Authority
Perhaps you are actively searching for websites to publish a link to your website or are trying to identify blogs for a guest post proposal. Regardless the case you should always check the Domain Authority.
Domain Authority or Domain Rating or Authority Score are indicators of a website’s overall quality and SEO performance. The higher the score, the more trustworthy that website is.
Usually the DA score ranges from 0 to 100. Try to avoid publishing backlinks on domains with a score below 30. Google may read a link from a website with a DA of 10 as spammy and thus could lower the search rankings for your website.
Relevance
Besides authority you should check the relevance of a domain. If you own an online pet-shop, links coming from a boat magazine won’t be as valuable as links coming from a veterinary publication.
It’s more likely to gain a boost in rankings if you gain a backlink from a similar domain.
Unlike backlinks coming from domains with low DA score, irrelevant links won’t lower your rankings.
Do follow
While simple mentions of your brand are important as well when it comes to off-site SEO, you should always go for Do Follow backlinks when it comes to link-building.
Do Follow backlinks transfer the DA from the referring domain to your website. No Follow links tell Google not to follow the outbound link, indicating that the source does not endorse that connection.
So not only are No Follow links useless from the SEO point of view, but they could actually hurt your rankings.
Destination
This indicates the part of your website backlincks are pointing to. Most backlinks will point to the homepage, which is natural.
But if you own an e-commerce store there are specific category pages you want to rank. So the backlinks should be pointing to these webpages.*
*Relevance also works backwards. If you published a guest post about paintbrushes, the backlink should point to a page displaying brushes for sale and not a page about food items.
Anchor text
The anchor text is the clickable part of the text, that contains the link pointing to your website. So if you can control this, you should make sure this snippet is rellevant for the landing page it is pointing to.
However you shouldn’t try to only use keywords with high monthly search volume, but rather allow some of the anchor texts to be more natural.
Placement
Links placed on the content that gets the most attention are more likely to be clicked on. So you should take that into consideration when placing backlink.
Also links wich are placed higher up on the page or article usually generate a higher CTR and are clicked on more often.
But make sure you don’t insert too many links on a single page or article as that will only cause them to compete with each other.
Remember to also check the internal linking on your website. That is always a good way to pass authority around, making sure the pages you want will rank higher. Good luck!
Marele Diminutiv 