Backlinks are some of the most important components of many SEO and digital marketing campaigns, but some clients in this field don’t know how to keep track of them. How do you check backlink quality and confirm you’re in a good position for your website and brand?
At Upward Engine, we’re here to help. We offer the best link-building services and related solutions for SEO clients both inside Utah and nationally, including various tools to help you check backlink quality and ensure your site maintains quality backlinks (and avoids toxic ones). Here’s a primer on these tools and how we’ll help you utilize them!
High-Authority Vs Toxic Backlinks
Before we get into some of the specific tools that we use for backlink checking, it’s important to understand the difference between high-authority and toxic backlinks. High authority backlinks come from reputable and trustworthy websites that have a good reputation with search engines. These types of backlinks can greatly benefit your website’s SEO by showing search engines that your site is also trustworthy and credible.
On the other hand, toxic backlinks come from spammy or low-quality websites that can harm your website’s SEO by indicating to search engines that your site may not be reliable or legitimate. These types of backlinks can also lead to penalties from search engines, resulting in a decrease in your website’s ranking.
It is important for websites to regularly monitor and analyze their backlink profile to ensure that it only contains high-quality and relevant links. This can be done through various tools.
Important Tools to Check Backlink Quality
There are several key tools our online marketing experts will help you utilize to check backlink quality:
- Ahrefs: This is one of the most popular and reliable backlink analysis tools in the market. It provides detailed information on your backlinks, including their quality, domain authority, and anchor text.
- Moz Link Explorer: This tool offers a comprehensive look at your website’s backlink profile, along with spam score and other important metrics.
- Majestic: Another powerful backlink analysis tool, Majestic provides detailed information on your backlinks and allows you to compare them with your competitors’ backlinks.
- SEMrush: This tool not only offers backlink analysis but also helps you identify potential toxic backlinks that could harm your website’s ranking.
Key Metrics to Evaluate
Within these and related tools, there are several major metrics that will help showcase the quality of your backlinks:
- Domain Rating (DR): This metric, used by Ahrefs, represents the overall quality and strength of a website’s backlink profile. It ranges from 0-100, with higher scores indicating stronger backlink profiles.
- Domain Authority (DA): Developed by Moz, this metric also evaluates the strength of a website’s backlinks on a scale of 0-100. A higher DA score means better quality backlinks and a higher likelihood of ranking well in search engines.
- Trust Flow (TF) and Citation Flow (CF): These metrics, created by Majestic SEO, measure the trustworthiness and influence of a website’s backlinks. TF represents the quality of backlinks while CF reflects their quantity.
- Spam Score: This metric, also developed by Moz, measures the likelihood of a website being penalized by search engines for having spammy backlinks. A higher spam score indicates a higher risk of being penalized.
- Anchor text relevance: A general rule is to have a mix of anchor texts that includes the target keyword, as well as other relevant and natural variations. Having too many exact-match anchor texts can raise red flags for search engines.
- Referring page content: Because search engines value relevant and high-quality content, backlinks from pages with similar topics or themes as your website are considered more valuable. Make sure to choose the right websites to reach out to for backlinks.
Google’s Ongoing Focus on EEAT
For 2026 and moving forward, Google’s primary focus will be on expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) when evaluating websites. This means that not only does your website need to have high-quality content, but it also needs to establish itself as an authoritative source within its niche.
Some ways to demonstrate expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness include having backlinks from reputable sources, mentioning awards or recognition your website has received, and regularly updating your content with accurate information.
How to Disavow Poor-Quality Links if Needed
We went over toxic backlinks above – what happens if you have some pointing to your site? Say you’ve purchased links in the past or used a shady link-building service and now regret it. This is where disavowing comes into play.
Disavowing links means telling Google that those particular backlinks should not be counted when looking at your website’s ranking. Essentially, it’s like saying, “Hey Google, these links are not legitimate, and I don’t want them to be associated with my website.” This can help prevent any negative impact on your search engine rankings.
To disavow poor-quality links, you will need to create a text file containing the list of URLs you want to disavow and upload it to Google’s Disavow Tool. It’s important to note that the Disavow Tool should only be used as a last resort, after you have exhausted all other options for removing or improving these poor-quality links.
And at Upward Engine, we’re here to help with this entire picture, from checking backlink quality to optimizing your links, disavowing toxic backlinks, and more. Contact us today for these or any of our other digital marketing solutions!
