Traffic Or Domain Authority For Backlinks: What Is Best?

According to a recent study by Siteefy, there are almost 1.7 billion active websites around the world, with a whopping 175 sites being created every minute. It’s a crowded space out there.

If you’re reading this article, then you probably own one of them. Most likely you’ve had first-hand experience of the struggles of staying on the first page of search results. At times, it can feel impossible to beat the competition and appear in the top results.

One way to stay on that elusive first page is by making sure that you’re partnering with other websites. But is high traffic or domain authority more appealing to gain more organic backlinks? Or could you be using backlink software to gain more traction?

Read on to learn about the best practices to acquire more authority links to your site and how using SEO backlink software can make this task easier.

What Are Backlinks and DA?

First of all, it’s useful to understand what a backlink is and why it should be an important part of your SEO strategy. Google changes its algorithm up to 600 times per year and although a lot of these updates are minor, having a good backlink profile can help combat these.

The term ‘backlink’ is used to describe any link to your site from another, think of it as a vote of confidence that the content on your site is worthy of reading. This is a big plus in the eyes of search engine results. In short, the more links going to your site, the higher you’re likely to rank.

A common misconception is that DA is created by Google, however, it’s an independent metric given by Moz. Domain Authority, or DA as it’s often abbreviated as is a logarithmic score used to predict the likelihood of your website to rank on search engine result pages. Every site has a score ranging between one to 100.

An important thing to remember is that your site’s domain authority can increase and decrease. These fluctuations are relative to other similar sites as more, fewer, or different data points become available and are incorporated into those calculations.

It’s also worth noting that it’s much easier to grow your DA score from 10 to 20 compared to going from 70 to 80. Domain Authority should be used as a comparative metric against other similar sites.

Generally, sites with higher DA scores correlate with a higher likelihood of ranking although there are a lot more factors at play. The actual Domain Authority calculation uses an algorithm to predict how your site compares to other similar sites based on search engine results. Good quality links play a part in this.

As you can see, backlinks, DA, and search engine results are all linked. Having a good SEO strategy ensures that they all work together intending to provide a better user experience and in turn, increase traffic.

How Do Backlinks and DA Affect Your Ranking?

Search engine algorithms, like the ones used by Google, use the number of backlinks to your site as a key ranking signal. By having high-quality backlinks to your site, your overall site SEO will be impacted in a good way. But beware, not all backlinks are created equal.

Your domain authority can be impacted by the type of backlink going to your site and this can affect your site in a negative way if you have the wrong type of link. If you have too many low-quality links pointing to your site you can end up getting penalized.

Having a penalty against your site can see a drop in DA as well as decrease the likelihood of showing up on that all-important first page.

Not All Backlinks Are Good

One of the last things you want to receive a penalty against your site. Along with domain authority, every site is given a spam score. Essentially, this is given as a percentage, with 1%-30% being considered low. In the ideal world, you want to be below 5%.

Although a high spam score for your site doesn’t necessarily mean that your site is spammy, it does mean that a large proportion of websites that make up your inbound link profile aren’t favorable.

If you do have a low-quality link profile, then it might be a good idea to investigate these linking sites further and if needed, disavow any links with higher spam scores.

As tempting as it is, another big no-no in the eyes of backlinks is bought links. Not only are this often bad quality, but this is often a sure-fire way of landing yourself a penalty. Buying and selling links that violate Google’s Webmaster Guidelines can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.

All About the Hats

You might have heard the terms black hat and white hat being used in terms of link building. A black hat link refers to the spam-oriented tactic of building links, to use to increase a site’s DA and cheat the system. This also includes bought links, which were mentioned above. They will often have little value with regards to the customer’s experience, nor enhance your content.

White hat linking is a term used to get links in a more organic way. It is not frowned upon by Google. If you have good quality content on your site, other sites will naturally want to link to you. The aim is to add more depth to a topic and aims to benefit the user.

It’s Not About the Traffic

Although on paper, high traffic is a good thing, in reality, this isn’t the only metric you should be focusing on.

As with backlinks, you should be aiming for quality over quantity. If your site is receiving a lot of traffic, but these readers aren’t converting into leads or sales, then there’s something fundamentally wrong.

A way of checking if your traffic is low quality is by looking at things like your bounce rate metric. The industry average bounce rate falls about the 60% mark, however, if the bounce rate of your website is in the region of 80%, then it is a clear signal that your traffic quality is poor.

It’s also worth investigating the number of sessions per user and the time each person spends on your site. These are all good indicators as to whether the quality of your content isn’t captivating your readers, or that you’re attracting the wrong type of reader.

Ways of increasing traffic are to target more concise keywords with low difficulty and high traffic, create more cluster content, and of course work on your backlink strategy to gain readers more aligned with the content you’re creating.

Traffic vs Domain Authority Links

So the million-dollar question, what’s better, large volumes of traffic or higher DA? Something to bear in mind is that a high DA and large traffic volumes aren’t mutually exclusive. It is possible to have one without the other.

Potentially a site can have a high DA and low traffic, especially if they have been using some form of free backlink software and worked on niching down to a small but very focused audience.

In contrast to that, it’s also possible to have a low DA and high traffic, especially if you have a strong presence on social media, where you’re driving readers and customers to your site without needing to perform well in search engine results.

As with most things in life, it’s all about balance. Ideally, you want to have both; a good DA as well as organic traffic. One way to gain traction in both is to opt for quality backlinks as opposed to quantity.

By implementing some sort of backlinks software you can speed up this process

How Can Backlink Software Help?

Although you could carefully analyze what your competitors are doing manually, this process can be laborious and takes time.

By implementing an automatic backlink software and tools you will be able to compare what the link profiles of your competition look like, and begin to work on a strategy to outrank them much more efficiently.

Using traffic link software like SEOJet, you’ll be able to quickly produce reports of each result from page one of search results. Not only will you discover what content is on their page, compared to yours, but you’ll also find out which keyphrases why are using in their anchor text and their all-important backlink portfolio which will enable you to laser-focus your link building efforts.

Book Your Free Strategy Session

So, do you want to stop playing the guessing game as to what your competitors are ranking for and have a plan in place that actually works?

If you’re even thinking about amplifying your backlinks game then why not book a free strategy session and speak to a member of the team. Discover how we can help you to build a customized backlink plan for every page of your site using accredited, top-ranking data from Google.

No more guessing what words to use in your anchor text, no more unnatural or weak backlinks, just accelerated SEO and traffic growth.