Link building is one of the most tried-and-true strategies for increasing your website’s search rankings and overall reach. And it makes sense—websites that have a high amount of quality backlinks pointing to them are probably worth boosting.
But link building is a complex process, and website owners who don’t know how to measure their progress will end up:
Spending resources acquiring the wrong types of links;
Wasting time reaching out to the wrong prospects;
Suffering penalties from search engines for unnatural link patterns.
Thankfully, there are link-building metrics out there that allow you to stay on top of your link-building game and steer the ship in the right direction.
In this guide, we’ll take you through the link-building metrics that actually matter.
Link-building metrics measure different aspects of your website’s link profile. They are vital for getting an accurate view of your website’s SEO position and informing future strategy decisions.
Domain authority and page authority are highly important, broad link-building metrics. Optimizing the other, more specific metrics results in a high score for these two.
Link-building metrics are the most helpful when they’re used the right way and compared only with those of your most direct, relevant competitors.
Link-building metrics are calculations or scores used to evaluate the effectiveness of the backlinks pointing to your website.
For anyone actually serious about building links in a meaningful way, link-building metrics are absolutely crucial. Besides helping you track your performance, they can guide your overall strategy, show you how you stack up against competitors, and reduce your risk of search engine penalties.
There are two main categories of link-building metrics:
Quantitative metrics deal with numbers, and they measure the more technical aspects of your backlinks with precision.
Qualitative metrics measure things like relevance and overall SEO impact, and they’re usually a bit harder to measure in a definitive sense.
When analyzing your own link building metrics, you’ll naturally want to compare them with those of other popular websites. When you do this, it’s critically important that you compare only with actual competitors in your same niche. A “good” score for a certain link-building metric might actually be a “bad” score for a different website in a totally different industry.
So when assessing your own link-building performance, be sure to do so in context.
More on this later, in the “Best Practices” section.
Domain authority predicts how well your entire website will rank in SERPs (search engine results pages). Page authority predicts the same, but for individual pages of your website.
Both of these metrics are measured on a simple scale from 1 to 100. The closer your website or page is to 100, the greater its potential for a really high SERP ranking. Domain and page authority are very similar to the PageRank metric, which is Google’s own method of calculating a page’s position in the SERPs.
To enhance your domain and page authority, focus on:
High-quality links from authoritative websites;
Relevant links that actually help users;
Balanced ratio of do-follow to no-follow links;
Intuitive site structure and navigation.
To measure your domain authority and page authority, use a link-building tool like Moz’s Link Explorer. Moz was the company that developed domain and page authority in the first place—so yeah, it’s a pretty good place to start.
As we continue through this list, you’ll find that domain authority and page authority are extremely broad metrics that measure your website’s SEO strength as a whole. So optimizing many of the more specific metrics below is one of the best ways to positively impact your domain and page authority.
Referring domains are the unique domains that link back to your website.
This quantitative metric is “scored” by simply counting the number of domains that link to you. The higher the number, the better your SEO. It’s important to note that the referring domains metric does not count the total number of links leading to your site—only the total number of domains. So if one website links to your site 1,000 times, that’s still only one referring domain (yeah, sorry about that).
Strategies for increasing your number of referring domains are pretty straightforward:
Pump out diverse content that will attract different audiences;
Write guest posts for relevant-but-different niches;
Build organic relationships with influencers and industry leaders.
Build backlinks on educational (.edu) and government (.gov) websites.
You can count your referring domains via a dedicated link-building service like Profit Engine, or with tools like Moz's Link Explorer, Ahrefs, or SEMrush.
Link relevance is exactly what it sounds like: It’s a measure of how relevant your content is to the content that contains your backlinks.
In other words, when a user follows a backlink to your website, how much does your content actually help them? This is a strictly qualitative metric, as it’s hard to represent relevance as a number or score. The important thing to know is that search engines use advanced algorithms to assess how closely related two linked pages are, and its findings affect how much value it assigns to the link.
Here are four things search engines look for when assessing link relevance:
Topical alignment: Is your page’s content related to the content on the linking page?
Anchor text relevance: Does your anchor text accurately summarize your content?
Content quality: Are both pages authoritative and high-quality?
User intent match: Do users find what they’re actually looking for when they click your links?
Again, since link relevance is a qualitative measurement, there’s no cut-and-dry way to measure it—but using the above strategies on all of your backlinks is a surefire way to maximize it.
Anchor text distribution measures the percentages of each type of anchor text across the entirety of your website.
Anchor text can be:
Exact-match: This is when your anchor text perfectly matches the page title;
Partial-match: This is when your anchor text contains at least one primary keyword;
Generic: This is when you write something generic, like “Click here for more.”
Branded: This is when you put your brand name in your anchor text.
If your website contains all of these types of anchor text in more-or-less equal percentages, you’ll have a solid anchor text distribution. If 90% of your links use exact-match anchor text… not so much. And of course, the better the anchor text distribution, the higher the search rankings.
If you’re not totally into the idea of manually counting up and categorizing every piece of anchor text across your website, we get it. So, do two things:
Consider a link-building agency like Profit Engine. These types of agencies can create a full backlink profile for your website—and that includes calculating anchor text distribution.
Look at how we just used point 1 above to show you a perfect example of branded anchor text. You’re welcome.
This metric compares the amounts of do-follow links and no-follow links pointing to your website.
Do-follow links tell search engines to “follow” them and take them into account when determining your website’s SEO ranking. No-follow links do the opposite—visitors can still use them to get to your site, but search engines ignore them for SEO rankings.
This is where organic backlinks really hold their own against purchased backlinks. Purchased backlinks are usually marked as no-follow in order to reduce the chances of getting flagged by search engines. These no-follow links help with increasing traffic, but they don’t directly provide an SEO bump. Websites that build links organically don’t have to worry about this, and usually have a much healthier proportion of do-follow to no-follow links.
So yeah, the best way to optimize your do-follow vs. no-follow ratio is to build links the hard way: guest posts, niche edits, relationship-building, and all that other good stuff.
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Traffic from referring links is the number of users who actually follow your backlinks and end up on your website.
In an obvious way, this metric is super important because more visitors usually equal more sales and conversions. But traffic from referring links can be measured in many different ways beyond just counting the number of visitors. With analytics like session duration, bounce rate, and pages-per-session, you can also analyze how much relevant traffic your links are bringing in.
The best way to up your traffic from referring links is simple: provide value to the visitors of the linking site. You can do this with many of the methods we’ve already covered: writing high quality guest posts, using proper anchor text, and placing your links only on high-quality websites.
Link velocity measures how fast a website gains or loses links over a given period of time.
Search engines don’t like stagnant websites—even if they’re popular. Gaining new, acquired links on a regular basis proves that your website is growing and staying up to date on the latest industry info and news. These are the kinds of websites search engines like to boost.
A healthy link velocity varies quite a bit between industries, but it generally falls somewhere in the middle of the possible range. A very low link velocity shows that your website may be diminishing into irrelevance—and an absurdly high one may alert search engines to spammy, illegal behavior.
Here’s how you can optimize your link velocity:
Constantly publish new, interesting content;
Promote your content through social media and other channels;
Cover seasonal or viral topics.
You can use tools like Moz's Link Explorer, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to track your link velocity.
Link trust refers to how much trust search engines have in the websites that contain your backlinks. Spam score estimates how likely it is that your website will be penalized for spammy behavior.
These two metrics are inversely correlated (flashback to statistics class, anyone?). Higher link trust results in a lower spam score, and vice versa. Link trust isn’t quantified as a number, but is measured with advanced search-engine algorithms. Spam score is quantified differently depending on which tool you use to measure it, but usually it’s on a scale of 0-100%, with the percentage indicating the likelihood of penalties.
If you’ve read this whole article up until now, you probably have a good idea of the types of practices that can enhance your link trust and lower you spam score:
Build backlinks only on high-quality websites, even if it means sacrificing link quantity;
Get your links from diverse sources (like .edu and .gov websites);
Maintain a healthy link velocity metric (don’t build links too fast, and don’t build them too slowly).
Again, Moz's Link Explorer, Ahrefs, and SEMrush are all great tools for measuring link trust and spam score.
Link longevity is the expected lifespan of your backlinks.
Obviously, the longer your backlinks last, the longer they’ll be able to pass you link juice, and the more traffic they’ll be able to bring you over time. Stable, enduring backlinks are typically signs of genuine relationships with linking websites and high-quality, relevant content that actually helps readers.
There’s no “score” for link longevity. Long-lasting links are good, and short-lived ones are bad—it’s really as simple as that.
The easiest way to ensure link longevity is to make sure your backlinks point readers to truly valuable content. When building a backlink, ask yourself this question: “If this link were to break, would people notice?” If the answer is yes, you’ve got yourself a winner.
Besides that, build solid relationships with the owners of the linking websites, and try to place your links in the main body of a page, as opposed to at the very beginning or end.
Congratulations—you now know the details about the most important link-building metrics. Or maybe you knew all that already and just skipped immediately to this section. Either way, it’s time for some best practices to keep in mind as you go about calculating and analyzing these metrics for your own site.
We’re going to keep it practical, so get ready for lots of bullet points.
Set clear objectives: Before you even start, set some goals for your website. What do you actually want to accomplish? Increase your domain authority? Improve your keyword rankings? Drive more referral traffic? “All of the above” is a fine answer too—just try to make your goals as specific as possible, and even divide them into categories if necessary.
Select the right metrics: Choose the link-building metrics that measure your progress towards the goals you set in the previous step. For instance, focus on domain authority for overall site strength, or referring domains for diversity in your link profile.
Monitor regularly: Use link-building agencies like Profit Engine, or SEO tools like Moz to track your selected metrics on a regular basis. This way you can stay on top of any trends and fix the bad ones before they get too bad.
Act on the data: Compare the changes in your metrics over time, and figure out what’s driving the positive ones. If certain types of content attract more high-quality links than others, produce more of that content.
Integrate with other SEO activities: Combine analysis of your link-building metrics with other SEO efforts—things like keyword research and on-page optimization—to ensure you’re working with a comprehensive strategy that leaves nothing out.
Compare with the right competitors: This one is huge. Select direct SEO competitors who currently rank well for your own target keywords and have a strong presence in your industry. Comparing your website’s link profile to that of a website in a totally different industry will be counter-productive at best.
Use benchmarking tools: Don’t do everything manually. Utilize AI-powered services like Profit Engine to conduct thorough backlink gap analyses. Make a spreadsheet and compare every one of the metrics covered in this article with those of your most popular competitors. Wherever you see differences, seek to close them.
Reach out to the right linking websites: Figure out which high-quality sites are linking to your competitors, but not to you. These sites can be the most productive outreach prospects, so you should focus on them.
Modify your goals: Based on your findings in the previous steps, feel free to alter your goals to make them more realistic or even just more focused on the areas where your competitors are succeeding.
Don’t focus solely on quantity;
Avoid obsessing over single metrics;
Beware of rapid changes in link velocity;
Don’t neglect no-follow links;
Regularly update and re-evaluate your metrics;
Avoid black-hat techniques at all costs.
There are so many link-building metrics out there that it’s easy to get overwhelmed. The ones covered in this article are the ones that actually matter—and they’re the ones you should focus on if you really want to optimize your website for SEO.
If staying on top of all these metrics is a little more than you bargained for, professional link-building agencies like Profit Engine can do all of the grunt work for you. And not only that—as seasoned pros, they can provide additional insights that you might have otherwise missed in taking the DIY approach.
And yes, strategy sessions are always free.
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