The Only Link Worth Building

The link building industry is obsessed with metrics (for why that's a problem, see my take on backlink theater) -Domain Rating, Domain Authority, Trust Flow, Citation Flow, and whatever new proprietary number some tool vendor dreamed up last quarter to justify their subscription fee -and every single one of these metrics can be gamed, and they are, constantly, by an entire cottage industry of people whose job it is to make worthless sites look valuable on paper, which brings me to the only link quality signal that actually matters, the one signal most SEOs ignore completely because it can't be automated or scraped or turned into a colored bar graph in a dashboard.

The Signal That Can't Be Faked

Does the linking page get real traffic from real people? That's it, that's the whole evaluation, the entire framework, the one question that collapses all the complexity of link quality into something you can actually answer -because a link from a page with 10,000 monthly visitors passes more value than a link from a page with 0 visitors, regardless of what any metric says about the domain, regardless of whether that domain has a DR of 90 or a Trust Flow of 75 or whatever other number makes the client feel good about the money they spent.

And the reason this works as a heuristic is that Google can actually see the traffic -they have Chrome data, they have Android data, they have more telemetry about actual human browsing behavior than any third-party tool could dream of accessing -and so they know which pages people actually visit, which means a page that real humans read and engage with is, by definition, valuable in Google's eyes, and a link from that page is an endorsement that matters in a way that a link from some orphaned guest post that nobody has ever clicked cannot be.

How to Check Real Traffic

Before pursuing any link, estimate the page's actual traffic, and you have several options for doing this: Ahrefs or Semrush traffic estimates, which are not perfect but directionally useful enough that if a page shows 0 estimated traffic it's probably worthless regardless of what the domain metrics say; SimilarWeb for larger sites where you want a rough sense of real visits; or, and this is the one people forget, just common sense -would anyone actually visit this page, would you visit this page, and if it's a random guest post on a blog that hasn't published anything in two years and the last article was about "10 Tips for Social Media Marketing in 2019," the answer is obviously no, nobody is visiting that page, and a link from it is worth approximately nothing.

The Ghost Site Problem

Most link building targets "ghost sites" -Potemkin villages that exist solely to sell links, sites with a profile that looks legitimate on paper (DR 50+, hundreds of pages, accepts guest posts, publishes on a schedule that suggests an actual editorial operation) but that have zero actual readers because the posts exist only for link juice, and nobody visits except other SEOs checking metrics before deciding whether to buy a placement.

Google knows which sites are real and which are link farms dressed up with metrics, because again, they can see the traffic, they can see whether humans actually visit and read and click and engage -and so a link from a DR 70 ghost site is worth less than a link from a DR 30 blog that actual humans read, which is a sentence that would make no sense if you believed the metrics but makes perfect sense once you understand that the metrics are measuring the wrong thing.

What Actually Drives Link Value

The hierarchy of link value, from most valuable to least: Tier 1 consists of links from pages that rank for competitive keywords, pages that have proven their value to Google and whose links therefore carry weight because Google has already decided these pages are worth showing to searchers; Tier 2 consists of links from pages with consistent traffic even if modest, pages with real readers and real engagement and therefore real value; Tier 3 consists of links from new pages on established sites, pages that don't have much traffic yet but exist on domains that have earned trust; and Tier 4, which is worthless, consists of links from pages with no traffic, no rankings, no readers -and it doesn't matter if the domain has DR 90, because if nobody sees the page the link doesn't count, and worse, if those links come from link schemes they can trigger a manual action that takes seven years to escape.

The Practical Filter

Before pursuing any link opportunity, ask yourself these questions: Does this page rank for anything, would I click this link if I saw it, would this link send me actual referral traffic, is there a human audience that would see this? And if the answer to all of these is no -if this is a page that ranks for nothing, that you wouldn't click, that wouldn't send you traffic, that no human audience would ever see -then the link isn't worth your time regardless of what the metrics say, regardless of what the link vendor promises, regardless of how impressive the domain authority number looks in the pitch deck.

Stop chasing metrics, stop paying for links from ghost sites, stop believing that a high DR number means anything at all about whether a link will help you rank -and start chasing links that actual humans might click, links from pages with real traffic, links that exist because someone genuinely thought your content was worth referencing rather than because you paid them $200 for a guest post placement. And once you have quality external links, make sure you're also maximizing the value of your internal links, because the same principles apply there too.