When building backlinks yourself, be sure to concentrate on the quality and not the quantity. This will allow you to increase the number of backlinks that are safe to build to your site.
While we have a lot of information on the qualities that make a high-quality backlink there are a few things you should remember when building links quickly.
Authority and Trust
Authority is a rather obscure concept. It’s represented by Ahref’s DR, (Domain Rating), and Moz’s DA. They are affected by the quality and quantity of backlinks a domain has, as well as intangible factors like the domain’s trustworthiness. The more backlinks, the better.
Let’s return to the example of the website which received hundreds of backlinks quickly because of good press. Are you sure that all those backlinks were from sites with high domain authority/domain records? It’s safe to assume that they weren’t, as this is not how the internet or SEO works.
This is only one consideration and should be considered together with all the other factors in this list.
Relevance
It is best to have your link come from an article or domain about which it makes sense to link to. Google sees a website that is about pets linking to your site about dogs. It makes much less sense to link a website about pharmaceuticals to a marketing website.
You don’t need to be a master of relevance, just use your brain. This type of link could be in real. Is it something that a novice SEO would do or is it just a gimmick?
Other Factors
Other metrics that you should consider are traffic, traffic location (top-level domain), rankings, current site health, quality backlink profiles and so forth. As with all things in SEO, we only want naturalness.
Footprints
The unique signatures (footprints) for a few types of links were discussed in the previous section. PBN links are unique in that they are usually homepage links. This makes them much more common than inner-page links. PBN links are powerful because of this, but it is important to remember that you must be careful.
Search engines won’t recognize this as a pattern that does not normally occur. You need to be careful not to get too many of these backlinks. You might also be subject to a penalty if you include other unnatural elements.
For your site’s safety, maintain backlink diversity. For added naturalness, mix in other types of backlinks such as social signals (see: What are social signals?) and high-quality guest posts and edits.
