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3 Reasons Lower DA, More Relevant Links are the BOMB

By Snap Agency July 25, 2017

If you’re interested in digital marketing, then you probably know how important backlinks are to your rankings. If not, the long and the short of it is that the more backlinks from authoritative sites, the higher you’ll rank for the keywords you target.

However, it’s not all about the high DA websites. In fact, in some cases, links from smaller sites that are more relevant can be much more powerful.

As well as that, these authority sites get loads of emails each day from people wanting a link. On the other hand, these smaller sites rarely ever get an email so it can be much easier to get a link from them.

In this article we’ll be explaining more about my lower DA, more relevant links can be some of the most powerful and why you shouldn’t disregard them.

DA Sucks

One of the biggest reasons why you shouldn’t focus on just getting links from high DA websites is because DA is a terrible metric. Not only is it incredibly easy to increase by using spam links, Moz’s crawler is particularly bad, and that means they have a weak database of links.

In comparison, Domain Rating (DR) by Ahrefs is a much better metric if you’re looking for authoritative sites that will give powerful links. DR is a far better metric for this purpose because Ahrefs link database is significantly bigger and it picks up new links much faster than Moz.

However, the main point is that DA, DR or any other domain strength metric isn’t that important. Although you are getting a link from the domain, that link will be on a specific page.

What’s more important is the strength of the page which is linking to your website. For this purpose, you’d be better to use UR by Ahrefs or TF by Majestic.

Relevancy is Super Important

We also know that relevancy is an important ranking factor and is likely to continue to become a more influential part of the algorithm and of course it should be. If you were to get a link to your cooking website from another cooking website that should be more valuable than a link to your cooking website from a gardening website.

That’s because the opinion of a related website is likely to be far more informed. Also, links aren’t just there to pass PageRank; they are there to direct users.

So, users on that gardening website probably don’t care about cooking, and so that link shouldn’t be particularly valuable.

The majority of SEOs believe that Google factors in the relevancy of the linking page and the linked to page, to decide how valuable it should be. Not only that, but there is also the belief that too many irrelevant links can cause a website to be penalized or throttled by Google.

Both of these factors should show you how important relevance is. Of course, if Huffington Post or another news website gives you a link, you take it. But the point is that the vast majority of your links should be from relevant sites.

In fact, this shouldn’t be a problem at all presuming that you’re using ethical content marketing tactics. If you’re simply marketing your content in a way that follows Googles guidelines, then it’s extremely unlikely that websites in different unrelated industries will link to your content.

No, the sites that will share your content on their website will be ones that have a similar audience that will also be interested in your content.

The only people that end up with irrelevant links are those who go out of their way to try and build backlinks wherever they can get them for ranking.

If you focus on genuine marketing and providing value to your readers, then you should never have any issue with relevancy.

Revenue is the Name of the Game

Finally, the number one reason that relevant links are the absolute bomb is that links are designed to send targeted traffic to related pages.

If you sell cakes and a cooking blog creates a backlink to your website, then some of those visitors might buy your cakes. However, if you sell industrial machinery and the same cooking blog links to you, nobody is going to buy anything from you.

The point of a link is to let people know about something that is relevant to the page that they are already on. If a link never sends any traffic, then it’s almost pointless, and there is no reason why Google would want to give it any value.

Links should drive traffic and traffic should convert into paying customers that increase your revenue. The SEO benefit is fantastic, but it should be secondary to driving revenue.

Conclusion

If you take anything away from this article, then it should be that DA and authority aren’t everything. The relevancy of the links that you acquire is just as important as the domain that they are located on.