To check backlink quality, look past the authority score: confirm the site gets real organic traffic, covers your topic, reaches your market, links out with care and would place your link where a reader might click it.
By Kristijan GjorgjioskiIndependent SEO consultantPublished 18 October 2026 · 6 min read
Here's a pattern I see in a lot of the link profiles I audit.
Someone set a rule like "only sites above DR 40", then built links on any site that cleared it.
The score looked great. The links did almost nothing.
That's because a domain metric measures links, not quality.
In this guide, I'll show you how to check backlink quality the way I vet prospects for my link building campaigns, in seven steps you can run on any site in about ten minutes.
A high-quality backlink is a link from a real, trusted site with an audience close to yours, placed in content where a reader might genuinely click it.
That definition has four parts: real, relevant, read and clickable.
Authority scores like Domain Rating, Domain Authority or Authority Score try to estimate the first part.
They're useful for one thing: throwing out obvious junk fast.
But they're third-party numbers built from link counts.
Link sellers know that, so plenty of sites are built to score high and do nothing else.
Here's how the signals compare:
| Signal | Strong link | Weak link |
|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | Steady or growing for years | Flat, tiny or crashed |
| Topic | Close to your industry | Covers everything |
| Readers | In your markets | Elsewhere, or nobody |
| Outbound links | Editorial and selective | Sold to anyone who pays |
| Placement | Inside the article body | Footer, sidebar or author bio |
| Click test | A customer might click | Nobody ever would |
You'll need a backlink tool such as Ahrefs, Semrush or Moz for traffic estimates. Your browser does the rest.
Run these in order on every site you're considering. If a site fails an early step, you can stop there and move on.
Traffic is the quickest proof that search engines trust a site.
Open the domain in your backlink tool and look at the organic traffic chart for the last two years or more.
What you want:
What you don't want is a sharp crash with no recovery.
That often points to a core update or a penalty, and links from that site are unlikely to carry much weight.
Note: Traffic figures in third-party tools are estimates. Use them to compare sites and spot trends, not as exact numbers.
Relevance is the part no score captures.
Look at the site's top pages and the keywords it ranks for.
Then read three or four recent articles.
Ask yourself: would someone in my industry read this site?
A small trade publication about your field beats a huge lifestyle blog that writes about holidays, crypto and kitchen gadgets in the same week.
Adjacent topics count too. A bookkeeping firm can earn a useful link from a site for small-business owners, even if it never writes about tax.
A link from a site whose audience lives elsewhere does less for you.
Most backlink tools break organic traffic down by country.
Check that a healthy share comes from the markets you sell to.
This matters most for local businesses.
A plumber in Manchester gets more from a Manchester news site than from a bigger site read mostly in another country.
Local links and listings are a core part of local SEO for that reason.
This is the step that catches most link sellers.
Open a handful of recent posts and look at every outbound link in the body copy.
Red flags:
A site that sells links to anyone is the kind Google is good at discounting.
Its spam policies class buying links that pass ranking credit as link spam.
Where your link sits changes its value a lot.
A link inside a relevant paragraph is what you want.
Links in footers, sidebars, author bios and long lists of "useful resources" are worth less, and sitewide footer links appear in Google's list of link spam examples.
Also check the page your link would live on:
A link on a page Google never indexed is a link Google never counts.
Once a link is live, right-click it and inspect the code.
Look for a rel attribute. Google's guide to qualifying outbound links describes three values:
Google says links with these attributes will generally not be followed.
That doesn't make them worthless. A nofollow link in a trusted publication still sends visitors and recognition. It just isn't the same as an editorial followed link, so log it separately.
This last check sums up everything you've looked at so far.
Picture one of your real customers reading the page.
Would they notice your link and want to click it?
If yes, the link is probably good for rankings and for referral traffic.
If no, ask why you want it.
A link nobody would click is usually a link that exists only for search engines, and that's exactly the kind Google tries to ignore.
I track referral visits from every link I build.
It's the most honest quality score there is, and a proper GA4 setup makes it easy to see.
The same seven steps work in reverse on your existing profile.
Export your referring domains from Search Console's Links report or your backlink tool.
Then review the top sites by hand.
Look for patterns rather than single bad links:
Spammy links you never built are common, and usually harmless.
Google's disavow guidance says most sites will never need the tool.
It's meant for a considerable number of spammy or artificial links that have caused, or will likely cause, a manual action.
So don't build a disavow file from a tool's "toxic" score.
That's how good links get thrown out with the bad.
If you're worried about a past link scheme, start with my guide to manual actions versus algorithmic penalties to work out what you're dealing with.
Checking backlink quality takes ten minutes per site.
Skipping it can waste months of outreach on links that never move anything.
Make it a habit:
Once you know what a good link looks like, my list of link building strategies covers how to earn them.
For the bigger picture, see what off-page SEO covers beyond links, or how I approach off-page work for clients.
If directories and listing sites are part of your mix, my link prospecting automation finds the ones your competitors use, and every result is still checked by hand.
And if you'd rather hand the whole job over, here's how my hands-on link building service works.
There is no threshold that makes a link good. Domain Rating and Domain Authority are third-party estimates built from link counts, and both can be inflated. A small trade site with a modest score, real readers and a tight topical focus often beats a large general blog with a much higher number. Use the score to drop obvious junk, then judge everything else by hand.
Often, yes. Google's documentation says links with nofollow, sponsored or ugc attributes will generally not be followed, so they pass less ranking value. But a nofollow link in a respected publication still sends visitors, builds brand recognition and can lead to followed links from writers who see it. Judge it on traffic and reputation, not the attribute alone.
Export your referring domains from Search Console or a backlink tool, sort them by the sites sending the most links, and review the top ones by hand with the same checks: traffic, topic, audience, outbound links and placement. Look for patterns, such as many links from unrelated sites with identical anchor text, rather than judging single links in isolation.
Usually they are ignored. Google's disavow guidance says most sites will never need the tool. The real risk is a clear pattern of paid or manipulative links, which can lead to a manual action for unnatural links. If you have one, Search Console's Manual actions report will show it, and that is when a careful clean-up makes sense.
About the author
Kristijan Gjorgjioski
Independent SEO consultant · 6+ years in SEO · 60+ client websites worked on
I'm an independent SEO consultant with 6+ years in SEO. I run audits, migrations and content programmes for businesses in Europe, the UK and the USA, and I build the automation behind my own research.
Book a free 30-minute call. I look at your site first and tell you plainly what I would fix, and in what order.