I get asked a lot about how we measure link quality so this post contains the section on link criteria pulled directly from our onboarding form. The onboarding form contains sections for you to comment on each of these specific link criteria and make slight modifications if you desire.
Our Standard Link Metrics Are:
1) Ahrefs DR 20+
2) Ahrefs Traffic 1k+
3) Ahrefs Traffic Location
A minimum of 50% of traffic will come from English-speaking countries (US, CA, UK, AUS etc)
4) Traffic Decline / Traffic Trend (Ahrefs)
Each linking site will not have a 70% or greater traffic drop in the past 6 months
Outbound Link Exclusion
We will check each link opportunity and exclude any sites that have paid links out to sites in the following niches:
1) Online casinos & gambling
2) Porn
3) Viagra
We’ll only be excluding link prospects that actually link out to these niches. If they just mention these keywords we will not exclude it.
Here are examples of articles that mention keywords on our exclusion list but are not selling links so they would pass.
Casino Example:
https://etramping.com/is-one-day-enough-explore-macau/
Porn Example:
https://etramping.com/macau-food-porn-heaven-in-my-mouth/
Write for Us Page Policy
We will exclude sites with a “write for us” page if there is any mention of a money exchange. If there is no mention of money we will proceed to pursue a link from the site provided all other link criteria are met.
Link Insertions / Guest Posts Policy
We build links via guest posts and link insertions in existing articles.
We do link insertions provided:
1) The linking page is relevant to your target page.
2) The text surrounding the anchor is relevant and contextually makes sense.
We don’t stick to any specific ratio of guest posts to link insertions.
How we Identify & Exclude Link Farms
We avoid building links from link farms by:
1) Sticking to sites that are topically focused and avoiding sites that cover any topic, even if they pass the metric filter.
2) Avoiding sites that appear to link out to anyone that pays, even if the site is topically focused.
For example:
A “pet site” that has an article about how to find the best Plumber in Houston “for your pet”, which links out to a Plumber in Houston website would fail our link farm test.
How we Determine Relevance
We will ensure the topic of the linking page is contextually relevant to the target page we are linking to.
For Example:
Linking page: https://babyjourney.net/when-do-babies-start-teething/
Target page: https://www.dentaly.org/us/babies-children/baby-teeth/
Both the linking page and the target page talk about baby teeth so it makes logical sense that this is a natural link.
We don’t require the entire prospect’s website to be topically relevant to the target site.
Outreach Exclusion List
1) We will use Ahrefs to identify and exclude any domains you already have links from so we don’t outreach to them again.
2) We will not build more than one link to your site from the same prospect’s website.
