A Detailed Examination of All the Factors That Influence the Value of Your Links

1. Anchor Text

Anchor text plays a crucial role in determining the value of a link. For those who are not familiar with the term, anchor text represents clickable words or phrases that serve as gateways to different pages. Anchor text contains links and its main job is to contextually connect two web pages together, while giving users an engaging and precise description of the page and content to which the link behind the anchor will lead them to.

Apart from providing insight into the nature of the connecting page, anchor text also sends relevant traffic and brings additional value to the primary page. It creates a picture in the user’s head of what to expect from the connecting page.

After the Penguin update in 2012, the relevance of anchors has significantly changed. These phrases were no longer used just for encouraging users to visit other pages.

Anchor texts are now one of the more important SEO factors in weighing the value of a link.

The engines use them as indicators to learn more about a specific page that’s being connected through these clickable words and phrases. Anchor text provides Google, Bing, and every other search engine with the details they need in order to be able to understand what the linked site is all about, which keywords it should rank for, and how and where to position it in search results.

There are various types of anchor texts:

• Exact match
• Partial match
• Branded match
• Brand + keyword
• The naked URL
• Generic
• The synonym
• The author

These are the standard types. Ones that are most commonly used across the Web. You can read more about every single one of them in our previous guide, titled “Every Damn Thing You Need to Know About Backlinks”.

There are no fixed rules for using anchor texts. There are no guarantees when it comes to boosting the traffic and relevance of desired domains and pages by strategical placement of your anchors.

You can link from one to eight words, it doesn’t really make a difference as long as you’re not constantly sticking to the same ones. The only thing you need to look after is the relevance of your anchors. If Google recognizes your efforts as spammy or misleading - you might get penalized.

Ahrefs did two studies on this topic. In their first experiment, they’ve looked at the influence of anchor text links in competitive niches on a sample of 51 keywords. The second one was a bit more ambitious, analyzing a total of 16k selected keywords.

According to their findings, exact match keywords still have an influence on top placements in competitive niches and the correlation seems to indicate that links with keyword rich anchors continue to help people rank well for their desired keywords.

It is in your best interest to comply with the guidelines and stay on Google’s good side. Even though there are no real rules regarding the location of the anchor within the text itself, practice has shown that you should never place them in the first/last sentence of the content. These particular areas have been proven to be red flags in the Penguin’s eyes, so it’s better to avoid using them.

The general advice is to place your anchors somewhere around your keywords. The closer, the better. Even though exact match still works (to a reasonable extent), you shouldn’t only pursue these anchors. Mix it up a bit. Try to think of phrases that you consider relevant for your business, and try to rank for them in search.

2. Page Rank

PageRank, or PR in short, is a mathematical algorithm used by Google to rank websites and pages in search. It calculates the quantity and quality of links leading to web pages in order to determine their overall value and authority, and it used to be a much more important signal than it is today.

PR operates on a simple principle: each link from one page to another, registers as a “vote”. The more votes you have, the better your page will rank.

But that’s not all. The quality and PR score of pages that link to your pages depends on the score of pages that link to them, and so on. The entire process is basically a cycle that examines literally every link that has been directly and indirectly tied to your page through link building or link earning.

The calculation seems a bit tricky at first, but it’s actually not. I’m not going to dive deep into the mechanics of PageRank in this article because it is not really that relevant to the main topic.

If you’re interested in learning how PageRank actually works, read this fantastic article by Ian Rogers. Ian did a great job of explaining all the elements and aspects of how Google looks at PR and uses it while determining how to rank pages in search.

PageRank uses a simple iterative algorithm. Google recalculates PR scores every time it crawls the Web. Even though that may be true, the world’s most popular search engine still favors older pages over newer ones.

When you think about it - it’s quite logical. A new page, regardless of its quality, doesn’t come with loads of quality backlinks, therefore it automatically receives a lower PageRank than pages with some history.

Of course, a page with zero links won’t be completely ignored by the search engines. It will get a small score of 0.15.

It’s not much, but it’s a start.

The PR formula also contains a damping factor, which focuses on the engagement of the page. This stops pages from having too much influence and authority.

As Mr. Rogers nicely explained in the above-linked article - Homepages get the most authority because they usually receive the biggest number of incoming links, a.k.a. votes.

Of course, it goes without saying that redirecting all of your links to your homepage is a bad idea with catastrophic consequences. Trying to abuse the PR calculating system by building an unnaturally structured site, will significantly harm your UX and expose you to a lot of serious issues.

A well-structured site will adequately distribute the PR value and help you earn more links organically. Strategic internal linking also helps your PR scores.

Even though there’s still a lot of controversy surrounding PageRank, the fact remains - PR still influences the value of your link. Google claims that PageRank still matters and that it helps search engines determine which are the most trusted sources for particular keywords and phrases.

So, what's the best solution here? What should you do to earn good PR scores?

If you’re interested in accommodating the PageRank part of Google’s algorithm, you need to do some grade A link building. Focus on quality instead of quantity and back your external linking with efficient internal linking. Be sure to frequently check the status of your links and remove all the risks and mistakes you have made in the process of acquiring new connections. Use the no-follow attribute correctly and make sure your site’s structure is nice and tight. Continue publishing high-quality content that attracts shares and mentions and you’ll be fine.

3. Relevance

Back in the day, search engines were looked at as query tools. Their main job was to execute queries over text documents.

However, that all changed over time.

The creation of the World Wide Web changed the paradigm in many ways. First web search engines faced problems with the quantity of information they were supposed to handle. The databases were significantly larger than previously thought possible.

The early 90s technology wasn’t really up to the job. The search engines were expected to return information in a fraction of a second, which was quite a challenge for that time. There was a constant fear of frequent server crashes, which is why it was necessary to find a simpler way for the algorithm to process queries.

Relevancy wasn’t officially an issue back then.

It was a problem for the future.

In today’s world, search engines are no longer concerned with finding 1000 or more documents that together provide decent representations of the user’s intent. Instead, the task moved in a different direction: leading the user to the one document they seek.

Google, the world’s most popular search engine, runs on a powerful and sophisticated algorithm that helps it provide its users with amazing results. Among other things, Google now computes the “relevancy score” that helps it understand if specific documents are relevant to specific queries - in relation to all the documents in the entire database, of course.

The engine evaluates content based on the inclusion of individual keywords. It strives to improve search accuracy by understanding the user’s intent through contextual meaning. By focusing on concept matching, synonyms, and conversational (natural) language algorithms, semantic search transforms complex and rough data into responsive databases.

Semantic search provides the engine with better chances of giving users what they’re looking for. It helps deliver more accurate results.

More data, less spam, a deeper understanding of what its users want and need, more natural language - these are all things that Google focuses on while creating a better experience for everyone.

According to a study conducted by Backlinko, semantic search is what counts now and what will remain in the years to come. Google looks at how informative and how relevant your content is, and it will continue to do so in the future. Backlinko’s report also explains that long-form content usually ranks better than short-form content, and that this is probably because it provides a lot more detail and useful information to the users.

So, once again - powerful content is the key! If you want to create valuable links for your domain, they need to lead to intelligent and relevant content that brings value to your targeted audience. Be sure to only pursue the topics you know a lot about, which are relevant for your business.

4. Domain Authority/Domain Rating

Domain authority, a.k.a. domain rating, depending who’s talking about it, is a ranking factor that displays the strength of a particular website’s overall backlink portfolio.

The score ranges from 0 to 100. The higher you’re on the scale, the stronger the authority/rating you’ll have in search.

DA/DR is calculated by evaluating the number of linking root domains, the total number of links, and a couple of other things that the tools using these metrics (Moz and Ahrefs, respectively) are not too eager to discuss.

DA/DR doesn’t only rely on the number of high DR sites that link to a targeted domain. It also looks at how many pages these high DA/DR sites are linking to. Once again, it’s a process that examines all the links coming to and going from your domain.

The metric itself is often used to compare the “ranking power” of different websites and understand if the link from a targeted domain is worth pursuing. It is a great metric for selecting websites to build links on.

As a general rule, you should strive to build backlinks from websites that have higher DR/DA scores.

However, as Ahrefs’ experiments have shown, the authority of each individual URL has a much higher correlation with Google’s rankings than the authority of the domain as a whole.

Google’s own analyst John Mueller even confirmed this by saying that they “don’t really have a DA score”. You can read more about it here.

However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that, as a metric, DA/DR should completely be ignored. DA/DR can still help you figure out which moves to pull to improve your rankings in search. For example, a website with high DA/DR has a lot of sweet “link juice” to offer. It can easily distribute powerful signals to your domain and pages.

5. Page Location

Domain authority, a.k.a. domain rating, depending who’s talking about it, is a ranking factor that displays the strength of a particular website’s overall backlink portfolio.

Even though Google now crawls everything, a lot of industry experts still believe that the pages which are higher up the site’s structure are more likely to get crawled.

This is just common sense.

The closer your page is to your homepage, the likelier it is to show up in search.

If your page is accessible from the homepage navigation menu, the link will certainly have a lot better chances to organically grab some traffic and even links.

Of course, manipulating your entire site structure for the purpose of promoting just one link is borderline insane.

As said above - if you try to manipulate Google’s PR calculation system, the search engine won’t like that. It will stomp on your rankings like Godzilla stomped on Tokyo. This will also significantly harm your website’s entire UX, which is a nightmare scenario in itself.

So, the main takeaway here is to play by the rules and try to figure out how to create and link to resources that are close to the homepage.

6. Internal Vs. Incoming Links

Understanding and using the difference between internal and incoming links strategically is of great value for your SEO strategy. In case you’re not familiar with the two, internal links are in-content hyperlinks that direct the visitor to another page on the same website, while the external incoming links are those coming from another site to the one you’re promoting.

Incoming and internal links come in many different shapes. They can be seen in forms of links that provide your site visitors with additional, relevant information (on and off your site) about the topic you’re talking about in one of your blog posts or landing pages, or anything along those lines - it all depends on what you’re doing.

Each type of link is important for SEO and it should have its own place in your digital strategy. If your goal is to boost your site and page rankings in Google’s search for relevant keywords, you need to understand how these link types influence the value of your domain and pages.

7. Editorial Integrity

This is a tough one. There are no genuine rules or bulletproof guides that will help you understand editorial integrity, nor learn how to successfully develop your own.

This is a total judgment call. Editorial integrity, a.k.a. editorial policy is basically a bar that websites set regarding the quality of content they’re interested in publishing. Popular websites value their audiences and they don’t want to present them with material that does nothing for them.

Google values user satisfaction more than anything else. The engine’s main goal is to provide instant information and trustworthy answers to the questions that people are typing in the search.

Once someone types in a query into the search bar, the engine will analyze all the indexed content that's relevant to that query. Then, it will examine how people have engaged with a certain page before finally passing the verdict on where to rank it.

Having that in mind, you need to prove to the engine that you understand this and that you’re committed to producing high-quality content. If you post a lot of nonsense on your site and link to domains that generate a lot of spammy, low-quality pages, your value will plummet in Google’s search.

Simple as that.

You need to set the bar high and only go for the gold.

Editorial integrity tends to create a lot of confusion and negativity. In most cases, when websites do a good enough job of making their editorial values transparent on a separate page on their domain, things go a lot smoother. Naturally, misunderstandings still happen, and people tend to get disappointed when their content doesn’t get published on a targeted site.

8. Content and Context

Another factor that has a lot to do with quality and relevance.

Just like I wrote under editorial integrity, Google values user satisfaction above anything else. If you do a good enough job of providing the engine with what it needs to continue to successfully serve its users, you're bound to get rewarded for your hard work and dedication.

Search engines love content, but they value context above everything else.

Google, and any other search engine, for that matter, does not provide recognition to a website that has links from sites that have nothing to do with their products or business. For example, a small cake shop should not really link to a car repair website. The two have nothing in common and they probably won’t receive any benefits from that type of link building.

Regardless of the type of links you’re pursuing, your actions in this department need to be part of a bigger plan. You need a solid reason for creating a specific link or piece of content. If you want to create a valuable asset on your own or someone else's website, you’ll be expected to put some work in.

That’s why most of us digital marketing professionals conduct frequent keyword analysis and reevaluate our own search traffic. We are always looking for those holes in the search that we could fill with our material and help the search engines provide users with what they’re looking for by presenting them with our page.

Your link building and content writing efforts have to be in perfect sync with each other, with your overall marketing strategy, and with what people are looking for in search. You need to produce content and pages that are interesting to your audience and the search engines as well. If you want Google to elevate you in the SERPs, it’s of great importance to provide the search engine with material that will help it satisfy its users.

9. User Engagement

The reason user engagement matters when it comes to calculating the value of links is because if a page is visited by a lot of people, who actually engage with it, Google will register that interest. It will start trusting it more and more, as long as the domain continues to keep a steady flow of traffic and user engagement.

So, having that in mind, your goal would be to create links on websites that can guarantee you traffic and engagement from their audience. Naturally, that is almost impossible in practice. You can use a variety of different tools to try to understand the overall engagement of particular domains, but you still cannot really know for sure how much traffic and activity you’ll receive from them until you’ve actually built the link.

That’s why it is of great value to first analyze your possible linking targets in a tool like Ahrefs. You want to know everything there is to know about a particular website before you approach it for a link. What’s its best performing content? What’s its DR? How many backlinks does it have? How many referring domains? What amount of traffic does it generate? - Basically, anything that could help you predict what you’ll get in return for your efforts.

If you want to check the overall engagement of a website, pop the hood up and start looking at your individual blog posts. If they rank well or get a lot of social shares - you’re on the right path. If their last couple of posts generated a lot of comments, and if users actually communicated with each other below the articles - that means there’s a legitimate chance of grabbing some sweet engagement.

10. Follow vs No-follow

Yes, of course, Google still looks at follow and no-follow links differently. As you probably already know, if you have read our 10,000 word-long article about backlinks, the “rel” attribute describes how much attention and value Google adds to a particular link when calculating where to place it in SERP for specific keywords.

In case you forgot what we have discussed about in our older guide, follow links count as points because they distribute link juice from one page to another and boost the PageRank of the linked-to sites, helping them climb up the ladder in Google search.

Contrary to them, no-follow links are not as valuable. They don’t really count as points, they don’t influence the page rank, nor do they help websites in any way by earning higher rankings in Google’s SERP for desired keywords. No-follow links have a different purpose. They aren’t completely useless. No-follow links can benefit your website in a more indirect way, like generating traffic

Regardless of the fact that your prime objective should be to create a steady flow of high-quality follow links from authoritative websites, it is also of great importance to diversify your backlink portfolio.

When it comes to Google, not all follow links are the same. Some of them won't improve your rankings at all, while others could even harm your site. Even though follow links are more valuable in theory, the foundation of every successful digital strategy is built upon a healthy balance of both follow and no-follow links.

11. Text-to-Image Ratio

Regardless of the fact that many industry professionals claim that text-to-image ratio is a legitimate factor that influences a value of a link, I don’t really agree with that.

At least not 100 percent.

The image-to-text ratio affects the overall value of a link in a more indirect way.

The number of images you decide to display on your page has a lot more to do with the users than with the search engines.

If you break a big chunk of text with nicely designed visuals - that could have a positive effect on your overall user satisfaction, and thus indirectly enhance the value of your link in the engine’s eyes through user engagement.

As I already explained above, user engagement is an important factor in this equation. If Google acknowledges that your pages are getting traffic and that people are actually interacting with your content - you will receive a boost in authority, and thus in rankings as well.

Research shows that images attract more people to content and help them easily digest the information that’s being laid down in front of them.

From that perspective, you could say that the text-to-image ratio has a genuine effect on the value of a link. If you overstuff your pages with images, people will get annoyed and leave. If you just upload a wall of text on your site, a significant number of visitors will probably get bored of reading your article and they will abandon it before they get to the end.

12. Link Age and Domain Link History

According to Ann Smartly, Backlinko, and a couple of other SEO professionals - link age is a legit factor when it comes to determining the value of a link. Meaning, older links have more ranking power than freshly acquired ones.

I don’t necessarily agree with that.

In my experience, age is just one of those background factors that could guide you in the right direction and indirectly help you pull the right move when it comes to building valuable links.

I see new pages outperforming old, crusty ones all the time.

So, speaking from what I’ve seen in my work, link age has no direct effect on the value of a link.

However, domain age is a whole different story.

Even though there are numerous blog posts and videos like this one from Matt Cutts where former Google employees or just people who are close to the company dismiss domain age as a legitimate ranking factor, experience has shown otherwise.

Trust is a big deal when it comes to calculating ratings. Google doesn’t trust all domains equally. That’s a fact. The engine uses a particular TrustRank in its algorithm that helps it battle spam on the web and arrange search results in accordance with how high or low they rank on the trust scale.

Meaning: The search engine favors domains that it already trusts. It places them above other domains in the SERPs for various keywords and topics.

Having that in mind, it’s safe to assume that a backlink from an older domain (a domain that Google is already familiar with) is more valuable than a link from a website that still hasn't made it to Google's trust list.

13. Topical and Page Authority

I have already discussed similar things in this article. This factor focuses on how relevant a specific link is for a website or a topic.

Website owners can leverage topical authority to improve their overall SEO efforts.

From an SEO perspective, this factor determines how trustworthy and relevant a link and domain is within a niche or market for a particular topic.

For example, the website of our other tool Dibz is a relevant source on the topic of link building and link prospecting. Everything we are doing in this department, we are doing to establish relevance in our niche and prove that our domain should be seen as an authoritative source when it comes to link prospecting and link building.

Reaching out to us with an article that isn’t really close to the topics we write about on our site is a bad idea. Apart from getting rejected by our blog editor, that kind of link wouldn’t do you much good, even if somehow you got it.

Topical relevance is just one of those microsegments that Google uses to judge the value and importance of particular links and websites in search.

For those who often get confused here, it is important to once again underline that topics and keywords aren’t really the same things. Topics are bigger than keywords. They are broader sets of ideas.

Working toward topical authority can lead you down a path where you’ll have to expand your focus a bit. You might find yourself in a situation where casting a bigger net of keywords could steer your business in the right direction.

The idea here is simple:

• When users start to look for places where to link everything about link building and SEO - you’ll appear in their search results.
• When users start to look for answers to their questions - they’ll find everything they need about link building on your website.
• When people start to look for places to reference and link while discussing or writing about link building - you’ll be it.
• When Google starts to look for an answer to a question - you will have it.
• When the world’s most popular engine tries to find additional info to answer other user’s demands - you’ll be there.

Basically, you’ll become a go-to resource in a particular niche, and thus your links will have more value on that topic.

If you run a website like Dibz and you operate in the same SEO industry, you need to chase your links on similar domains, if you want them to have any value. You need to create content and links within your area of expertise.

14. JavaScript vs HTML

Understanding JavaScript and how it affects your overall SEO performance is key to your success in this department. If search engines are having trouble crawling your website and understanding the content that you’re displaying on your pages - nothing is going to get indexed correctly and your rankings will plummet.

The most important part of any SEO strategy is to make it possible for the search engines to see the content and grasp your website’s purpose. If that isn’t possible, you need to pop the hood and take a close look at what’s going on under there.

Every modern web page is composed of the following elements:

• HTML - Hypertext Markup Language, basically the structure of the page and organizer of content.
• CSS - The makeup, the presentation layer of a page.
• JavaScript - the interactive and core component of the dynamic web.

Every single one of these elements is important to the page. If you imagine your page as a tiny robot, HTML can be explained as its skeleton, CSS its exterior, and JavaScript as its movement and functionality.

JavaScript lives in HTML. It is either placed in the document within <script> tags (i.e., it is embedded in the HTML) or linked/referenced.

JavaScript can have a negative effect on the crawlers. It can affect:

Bots’ ability to crawl your website and pages

Bots’ ability to access and understand your content

Block critical rendering paths

If Google is blocked from crawling JavaScript, the search engine will not be able to examine your website’s full experience, which means that it will not see what your end users are seeing, which could have a negative effect on the overall judgment of your website.

The simplest way to resolve this issue is by providing Google with the resources it needs to fully understand your user experience. Of course, if you don’t have any technical knowledge, it’s best to leave this task to the pros and contact your developers to determine which elements should and should not be accessible to the search engine.

One other thing - internal linking should be implemented with standard anchor tags within the HTML, never with JavaScript. Using JavaScript functions to make it possible for the users to journey across your website is never a good idea. Avoid using JS’ one-click events as a substitute for old-fashioned internal linking. Even though end URLs could be discovered and crawled by Google, they won’t really do your overall site’s navigation any favors.

15. Spam Issues

This one is pretty straight-forward.

As I wrote before in this article, Google is focused on providing the best possible experience to its users and it relies on a variety of factors to determine the authority and relevance of websites and pages it promotes in the search.

Google, and every other search engine despises spam and penalizes sites and pages that produce or intentionally link to it.

If you’re looking to create a valuable link, it has to be spam free. It has to be hosted on a good domain that doesn’t have any connections to sources that produce spam. The content needs to be good and the overall user engagement and satisfaction has to provide the engines with proof that your page is actually giving people what they have been searching for.

So, before you go on to create a backlink on a particular website, be sure to first thoroughly analyze it and look for “flags” that could serve as warning signs about the spam situation on a particular domain. Examine the domain link in Ahrefs or whatever tool you use to analyze the backlink situation of a particular site. There, you’ll have everything you need to know to determine if you should pursue a link from that site or not.

16. Page Speed

We have talked about this ages ago on our Four Dots blog.

Speed is a huge factor today. Well, it’s more of an indicator than an actual factor, but that still doesn’t diminish the importance of its role in this equation.

You can still get decent rankings with average page speeds, but if you want to get ahead of your competition in search, among other things, you need to prove to Google that you have the fastest vehicle in the race.

According to Google, the average time it takes for a mobile landing page to fully load is now around 20 seconds. Compare this with the 3 seconds it takes for the users to decide if they want to stay on your site or not, and you’ll have a better understanding of how the modern web works.

Page speed is super important for your SEO, but it’s even more important for your UX, conversions and overall user satisfaction.

It’s time to stop procrastinating and work on the load speed of both the mobile and desktop versions of your site. You should work on making your site as fast and accessible as possible. Also, if you want your backlinks to have any value, you should create them on websites that have at least decent page load speed.

As I pointed out numerous times before in this article, the top objective of all search engines is to provide people with an outstanding experience. Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu, and all other engines are focused on providing their users with what they want the very moment they start searching for it. Everything that makes it difficult for the users to access and consume the information they need is an immediate red flag in the search engine’s eyes.

If your page is taking ages to load, 9 out of 10 of users will get annoyed and leave it before it's fully displayed. Of course, search engines will almost immediately pick up on this, and they will push you down the search results because users aren’t getting what they need from your site.