Links: reading a link profile without deceiving yourself
Every metric in a link tool is a vendor's estimate. Useful for comparison, meaningless as an absolute.
What a link is, and what it is not
A link from one site to another is a reference. Search engines have long treated references as one signal among many, on the reasonable assumption that people link to things worth linking to.
What a link is not is a currency with a published exchange rate. Every numeric score attached to a link by a third-party tool is that vendor's estimate, produced from their own crawl with their own model.
Reading a link profile
- Where the links come from. A handful of relevant, genuinely visited sites beats a large number of empty ones.
- Whether they are editorial. A link someone chose to add differs from one that was bought or automatically generated.
- What the link text says. Naturally varied text is normal; identical commercial phrases repeated across hundreds of domains are not.
- How it grew. A profile built over years looks different from one that appeared in a fortnight.
- Relevance. A link from a site about your subject means more than one from an unrelated directory.
Third-party scores
| Metric type | Useful for | Not useful for |
|---|---|---|
| Authority score | Comparing two links roughly | Any absolute claim |
| Referring domains | Sense of breadth | Quality |
| Total links | Almost nothing on its own | Anything, really |
| Anchor text distribution | Spotting manipulation | Precise diagnosis |
| Traffic estimates | Rough order of magnitude | Actual numbers |
| Toxicity scores | A shortlist to review | Deciding anything automatically |
Earning references
The methods that work are slow and unglamorous: publishing something genuinely useful in a niche where little exists, doing original work worth citing, and being findable by the people who write about the subject.
None of this scales the way a purchase does, which is exactly why it keeps working.
Disavowing
Tools that flag links as toxic are pattern-matching, not judging. Acting on those flags without review can remove references that were doing good. If a site has not engaged in link buying, the usual correct action after reviewing a link report is none at all.