What Counts as a High-Quality Backlink?

　　In SEO optimization, high-quality external links are one of the goals every webmaster pursues, because they can effectively improve a website's ranking and more. Yet high-quality external links are a scarce commodity — many webmasters only build ordinary ones, and sites that generally carry a lot of low-quality external links usually don't rank well. So what kind of external link counts as high quality? What are the criteria?

　　1. Difficulty of acquisition is proportional to quality

　　The first time you ask a high-authority blog, forum or website to exchange friend links, you may be turned down — but don't give up. Communicate with the webmaster over a long period and try to become friends first; exchanging friendly links afterwards may be easier.

　　2. Content must be relevant

　　Some websites don't have particularly good content but have a solid backlink base and rank very well, so some website optimizers conclude that external links are what matter most — as long as you build enough of them, rankings will surely rise. But I have always held that content matters most, because only high-quality content can earn high-quality external links, whereas external links cannot generate the corresponding content for your website.

　　3. Breadth of links

　　1) A wide variety of site types: news sites, blog sites, forum signatures, etc.

　　2) Link position. Links in the main body generally perform best. But you can't have every link appear in the body text, so cover all positions — footer, navigation bar, body text — which also removes any suspicion of manipulation.

　　3) Different domains. Links should come from as many different domains as possible.

　　4) Different authority levels. Links will inevitably come from both high-authority and low-authority sites; if all external links came from high-authority sites, that would look suspicious.

　　5) Different IPs. If a large number of external links come from the same IP, it may be judged as suspected manipulation.

　　6) Different seniority. External links should include some from established sites and some from new ones.

　　4. High authority

　　More and more webmasters now chase website authority, because search engines are the main channel used domestically — basically all website optimization work is done to achieve better rankings in search engines. High-authority sites therefore usually reflect one thing: the site performs well in the impression of real people who find it through search. I doubt you have ever seen a bad website with high authority. Building external links through the forums of high-authority sites can effectively channel some of that authority and give the search engine a good impression of your own site. Generally, only external links placed on higher-authority sites can be considered quality-assured. Even when exchanging friendly links, webmasters consider the other site's authority, because authority directly reflects how the site appears in the search engine's eyes.

　　5. Few outbound links

　　The value of a website's external links can be calculated on the cake-cutting principle: the more people sharing, the smaller each slice. Likewise, if a site has few outbound links and high authority, then an external link from such a place is of relatively high quality. Because if you build many links there, most of the authority it passes out will not reach your site, so such links have almost no quality. Few outbound links means the site's authority is not dispersed to other sites but concentrated on this one, so if you build a link here, you could say most of it flows into your site. Such links are high-quality links — encyclopedia entries, for instance, are regarded by webmasters as high quality.

　　That is all of "What Kind of External Links Count as High-Quality External Links?" — offered only for webmaster friends to interact, exchange and learn. SEO optimization is a process that requires persistence, and I hope we can all make progress together.