We still get asked quite a lot about the relevance and importance of back-links from a SEO rankings perspective. Lots of people seem to think that in some way Google has de-emphaised their importance.

Its true Google has made lots of changes over the last couple of years but as far as we can see – and we deal with rankings on a daily basis – links are still incredibly important. Poor quality ones arent though – high quality certainly are.

Getting one high quality link quite often makes a substantial difference to your rankings – the trick is how to find them then create them, but what exactly do we mean by a good link?

A good measure is Domain Authority (DA) and to find yours or you competitors all you need to do is to go to Open Site Explorer – a free tool from Moz at… https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/

Here’s my example…..

moz-ose-500x231

This DA – 33 in my case – is on a scale of 1-100, but the significant thing is that its on a logarithmic scale rather than linear.

In practice this means that, for example, getting a link from a site with DA 50 is not twice as important getting a link from a DA 25 site – its more like 10 times more effective. Looking at it another way – getting 1 link from a DA50 site is equivalent of getting links from10 different DA 25 sites.

A good place to start looking for good links is at the sites of companies known to yourselves, who you already have a relationship with – then work out the best way to get a link from them knowing the effort will certainly be worth it if they have a high DA site.

We recently saw one of our customers move from low rankings to top 3 positions – just by getting 1 link from a DA65 site.

Another way of finding such links is through competitive analysis – finding what important links your high ranking competitors have. You can do this using Opensite Explorer and listing their links in DA order. You wont be able to acquire all of their links but there may be some with high DA you could get.

For the more adventurous…..

A more interesting way of doing it is through a dynamic link map….
dynamic-link-map

If you open up a new browser session and copy this url into it bit.ly/SGbDYa.

(open up 2 different windows so you can read this at the same time as looking at the link map)

The size of the blue circles is proportional to DA. If you click on the up arrow in the top left hand corner you will see the links fly in – spotting the larger blue balls is the trick. In this case you can see that the www.webtravelservices.com would be a link worth having.

If you want to create a dynamic site map there’s a blogpost we created which will show you step by step how to do it….

Creating a Dynamic Link Map https://www.janklin.com/blog/creating-a-visual-map-of-your-backlinks