rosemaryxanders
rosemaryxanders asked
Member (0 upvotes)

Can you determine if they are weak or strong backlinks?

Hi, I have a quick question about backlinks. I understand how backlinks' strength are determined by a site's DA, placement of backlink, dofollow vs nofollow, etc.. But are specific categories also stronger because of their categories?


For example, are editorial backlinks stronger because they ARE editorial backlinks or because they adhere better to criteria I just spelled out (in the body of the site, often near the top)? Same thing with comment backlinks? Are they weak because they're comment backlinks or because they're near the bottom of a page and often have to share outbound backlink juice with tons of other comment backlinks?


Thanks!

#backlinks#seo
Avatar for member KnowOneSpecial
KnowOneSpecial
Moderator (84 upvotes)

DA does not determine the strength of a backlink.  DA is a Moz metric that has never been used in Googles Ranking Algorithms.  

DA is just a guess ( an educated guess and fairly accurate ), at how easy or likely a given domain will show up in the search engine results pages.

The placement of the link on the page is still important... a link above the fold in content will provide more juice that a link below the fold.  Main Navigation and Footer Navigation links are considered less important as well when passing link juice.

Categories are not ranking metrics... it's about quality of content.  

Links in comments are spam if they can be left by anyone at anytime.  Google knows you and everyone else will spam these sites for a link and devalues the links appropriately.  

All links on a page, internal, external, and links marked "no-follow" take a bite out of passable link juice. 

Example :

A page has 10 links in the main navigation, 10 links in the footer navigation and say 2 links in the content and 3 links marked "no-follow".

That is a total of 25 links.  This means that  it a page had a PR of 1 then the most juice a link could pass would be PR 1 / 25 links = .04 PR per link.

BTW this was done by Google in the mid 2000's.  This eliminates page rank sculpting, a very old tactic and useless now.  

As for editorial links, well that again depends on the quality of the site the editorial link is one and the backlink profile of that particular editorial site.

As a general rule, if you can easily get a link from a site so, then everyone else can also get a link from that same site.  These links will be useless in trying to rank your site.  

The harder it is to acquire a link the better the link will be.  Sites that are Human managed and moderated will provide better backlinks overall.

Does this give you a better understanding of how links work ?

Good advice?
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