What are link quality and website metrics in a link building campaign?

"Quality" is the word everyone uses about backlinks and few people define. This guide explains what makes a link good, what the common metrics (DR, DA, Trust Flow and the rest) actually measure, and how to combine them into a sensible decision.

Quality beats quantity

Imagine applying for a job with two sets of references.

• Set one: 100 references, all from friends and family, all generic.
• Set two: five references from respected people in your field, each speaking to your actual skills, and known to the hiring manager.

Links work the same way. Search engines treat links as recommendations, and a recommendation is only worth as much as the person making it. Google's own documentation says it uses links as a signal to judge the relevance of pages and to find new pages to crawl. It also says that spam links can be discounted: since 2016, Google's Penguin system has been part of the core algorithm, and Google has said it devalues spam signals rather than demoting whole sites. So a pile of poor links usually doesn't help, and it wastes your effort.

What makes a link good

Relevance. The site and the page should be about something related to yours. A link from a serious industry blog helps more than one from a coupon site. There's no single relevance metric, so this one takes judgment. Look at what the site writes about and who reads it.

Real readers. The best links can send people, not just "link equity". A link in an article that ranks and gets traffic works twice: it's a citation, and it's a source of visitors.

Editorial context. A link inside the body of a useful article, surrounded by text that explains why it's there, is stronger than one in a sidebar, footer or long partner list. These are contextual links.

Natural anchor text. Google's guidance says good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to the page it's on and the page it links to. A mix of brand names, descriptive phrases and the occasional keyword looks natural. A profile where every anchor is the same money keyword looks engineered.

A site with standards. Does it publish original content regularly? Do old posts stay live? Does it link out to relevant sites, or sell links to anyone? A site whose only purpose is hosting paid links isn't a good home for yours.

Timing isn't a signal you can game. There's no official rule about how fast links can arrive, and growth that looks sudden may just mean a piece of content took off. What matters more is that each link makes sense.

The main metrics, and what they don't tell you

Ahrefs itself says DR is not a Google metric or a ranking factor, and advises against focusing your efforts on growing it. What DR is good for is comparison: sites with similar DR tend to have similar ranking potential, which makes it a useful shortcut for shortlisting.

A word about "good" scores. You'll see rules of thumb such as "DR above 50 is good". They're arbitrary. What counts as strong depends on your niche, your market and your competitors. Use metrics to compare, not to pass or fail a site. A DR 40 blog that your customers read is more useful than a DR 70 site that has nothing to do with them.

Types of anchor text

You'll meet four types when you review a backlink profile:

1. Exact match: the keyword you want to rank for, such as "SEO tips" linking to a page about SEO tips
2. Partial match: the keyword inside a longer phrase, such as "learn valuable SEO tips"
3. Branded: your brand name or URL, such as "Magfellow"
4. Generic: phrases like "click here" or "this guide"

There's no official ideal split, so be wary of anyone who gives you one. Look for variety and a natural feel, and let the sentence decide the wording.

Looking at the audience, not just the score

A large audience isn't useful if it's in the wrong place. For each site you consider, check:

• Where visitors come from. If you sell in Germany, traffic from Germany matters far more than global traffic. Our guide to finding blogs by country and language covers this.
• What the content is about. Do the site's topics overlap with your customers' interests?
• Who the readers are. Tools such as Semrush and SimilarWeb give a rough view of audience type and behavior.

What to do about bad links

You may have links you didn't ask for, or old ones from past campaigns. Google's guidance on the disavow tool is clear: it's an advanced feature to use with caution, most sites don't need it, and misuse can harm your performance. Google says to consider it only if you have a considerable number of spammy or low-quality links, and those links have caused or are likely to cause a manual action. In most cases Google can tell which links to trust on its own.

So don't disavow "just in case". Use it when there's a manual action or a clear paid-link scheme in your history, and get expert advice first.

A simple way to score a link

For a link you're considering, ask:

1. Is the site relevant to my topic and my market?
2. Does it get real organic traffic, and from the right country?
3. Is the link in the body of a useful article?
4. Would the anchor text look natural in the sentence?
5. Does the site publish original content and keep old posts live?
6. Is it free of signs of link selling, such as a "write for us" page on every topic or many unrelated outbound links?
7. Do the metrics (DR, DA, TF) look reasonable compared with similar sites in the niche?

If you can't answer yes to most of these, look elsewhere. To measure whether your links are working once they're live, see how to measure the success of a link building campaign.

We check every site before it goes on a client's shortlist. What we look at is on our guest posting page.

Sources

Checked on 30 September 2026.

• Google Search Central: Link best practices for Google (updated December 2025)
• Google Search Central blog: Penguin is now part of our core algorithm (September 2016)
• Google Search Console Help: Disavow links to your site
• Ahrefs: Domain Rating
• Majestic: Glossary (Trust Flow and Citation Flow)