Are you buying expensive backlinks that don’t work?

I’ve been building backlinks for over 10 years for clients and there’s one habit that persists and is costing people.

Think about this insane behaviour.

Imagine you’re buying a new home.

Do you assess only the property or do you check out the location too?

Or do you decide to buy based on the location and don’t bother looking at the property?

Of course not.

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You look at multiple factors, including the standard of the property, nearby risks, schools, and amenities to assess its true value.

But this happens all the time when people select sites for use in backlink building campaigns.

SEO people spend a fortune on sites that don’t even do half a job. just because they rely on using one metric to make a judgement.

And then they wonder why they get poor results!

Tell me, have you bought links using just Moz Domain Authority (DA)?

Whether you do or not, let’s consider why that is not the best practice.

Moz DA takes into consideration the quality of a site’s backlink profile, including backlink counts, quality and relative strength.

And, since 2019, it also integrates their spam score algorithms, which is a bonus.

It’s not a bad metric to be fair. Which is why many people rely on it to quickly check sites.

But DA is not a proxy for the overall quality of a site, and if it is all you use, then you’re probably not doing your rankings justice.

I’ll explain why in a moment.

But first, read this next sentence very carefully.

Cyrus Shephard of Moz specifically says:

“The first tip is never use Domain Authority in isolation. You always want to use it with other metrics and in context, because it can only tell you so much.”

So, from the horse’s mouth, acquiring a link from a site using just Moz DA is doing so with less than half the story.

Here’s a quick tip on how to use Moz DA properly

There are other factors that Google measures, not only related to backlinks, but also to traffic and overall search engine visibility.

So, the aim is to find the available metrics that measure those factors to some degree.

An example would be the metric ‘estimated organic traffic’, found in either Ahrefs or SEM Rush.

If Google likes a site, it will send it organic traffic, right?

Now, estimated traffic is not a ranking factor directly, but it hints at a level of trust afforded to a site by Google

And this is reflected in the visibility it has relative to other sites in its niche.

So, traffic is a metric worth checking alongside Moz DA to see if that high DA site you just found really is an authority.

However, be aware that sites with high traffic aren’t always legit, which I told you about in my other post 😉

Estimated traffic and Moz DA are just two good metrics that are excellent when used intelligently, like we do in our M-Flux formula.

In my next post, I’ll introduce to you the simple reason why ugly sites rock for SEO (sometimes) and how to use them with confidence.