I've been trying to learn more about fundamentals of link building / SEO lately. I had a lot of success early on with ColorBliss, but lately a lot of competitors have sprung up and to be honest are eating my lunch when it comes to SEO. I'm trying to get more strategic / focused on how I approach SEO.

My main takeaway from this article on Domain Authority as it pertains to backlinks:

What really moves rankings are links that are relevant, placed on real pages with traffic, and make sense within the content.

And that will be my focus :)

Highlights

  • • DR is driven by unique referring domains rather than total backlinks. Getting 100 links from one website won’t move your DR nearly as much as getting links from 10 different websites. • Nofollow links do not contribute to DR at all. • DR operates on a logarithmic scale. That means it gets progressively harder to increase as you move up. Going from DR 10 to 20 is quite easy. Going from 70 to 75 is an absolute slog. (View Highlight)
  • We can outrank the competition here for a number of reasons. For one, our SEO is much better overall, and our content is grade A, top notch stuff written by a real link building expert. But Google is also much better at determining how relevant our link profile is to the topic, as well as dozens of other little factors like user engagement, brand mentions, and others. (View Highlight)
  • If a site has extremely low DR, it’s usually not worth even checking. But once a site passes that initial DR test, I care much more about things like relevance, organic traffic, and whether the page itself actually gets visibility. (View Highlight)
  • I’ve seen plenty of high DR sites that offer zero value because the page is irrelevant or gets no traffic. (View Highlight)
  • If you want to go a step further, I recommend checking a few related signals while you’re there: • How many referring domains the site has • Whether it gets real organic traffic • Which pages attract the most links • What the anchor text profile looks like (View Highlight)
  • We know that DA still relies heavily on backlink data, but it also takes into account other factors, such as: • Spam Score • Traffic volume • Social media signals • Domain age (View Highlight)
  • How is Domain Authority Calculated? Domain authority is calculated using several factors, including a site’s backlink profile, link quality, Spam Score, traffic, and more. It’s a bit harder to explain than DR, because Moz doesn’t publish a clean, step-by-step formula the way Ahrefs does. (View Highlight)
  • But keep in mind that you should be checking multiple SEO factors before buying links. For example, relevance is far more important now than ever, so you need to be checking that too as well as organic traffic. Ideally, you want a high DA AND a highly relevant link rather than just a high DA link. (View Highlight)
  • Getting links from new domains will benefit your authority far more than getting dozens of links from the same site. (View Highlight)
  • Strengthen your internal linking: Internal links won’t increase DR directly, but they help distribute authority across your site and improve the performance of key pages. (View Highlight)
  • mixed strategy of high authority editorial links (links earned naturally), purchased links, and brand mentions or quotes in high authority publications. (View Highlight)
  • Relevance and traffic matter more than DR and DA scores: A DR 70 link on an irrelevant page with no traffic won’t pass much link juice. Google may even ignore it (yes, even if you paid a lot for it). A lower DR or DA link on a relevant, ranking page full of relevant keywords can be far more valuable. (View Highlight)
  • Page-level signals often matter more than domain-level metrics: Google ranks pages, not domains. (View Highlight)
  • What really moves rankings are links that are relevant, placed on real pages with traffic, and make sense within the content. (View Highlight)
  • you focus on that, third-party metrics like DR and DA will usually take care of themselves. (View Highlight)