In the last years, every time I had to evaluate a site for link-related reasons (meaning, for any possible reason I had to look at the value of a website that could link to mine), I always performed few checks:
- checked the website, obviously, to see what the site is about, how nice the design looks, how usable the site is (these things are important even if you just want a link because if design and usability are not there, you automatically know that the site is not made for real users);
- checked the backlink metrics, like Majestic’s TrustFlow and CitationFlow, Ahrefs’s Domain Rating, etc;
- checked the organic traffic / SEO visibility (using tools like SEMrush, Sistrix or Search Metrics), because a site that is ranking on Google is clearly a site with value in Google’s eyes… and so will be the links present in it.
SEMrush just launched a new metric called Authority Score that is going to help by cross-checking automatically backlinks and traffic:
This value is measured on a scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest, and is based on the following compound data provided by SEMrush:
- Backlink data (including Domain Score, Trust Score, referring domains, follow and no follow links, and more)
- Website traffic data
- Organic search data (including organic search traffic and positions)
As usual, when introducing a new metric in your work, I don’t recommend to dump any other metric normally used… spend time adding this to your analysis and over time you will understand how to evaluate it and use it.
Leave a Reply