In today’s article, we’ll show you how to get high authority backlinks.
We’ll also cover how backlinks work, where to find high domain authority link opportunities, caveats to watch for, and what types of links are easiest to land.
How Do Backlinks Work?
A backlink is a link that points from one website to another. They are seen as a vote of confidence and tell search engines that your content deserves higher rankings.
Not all backlinks are the same. Generally speaking, a backlink from a high authority domain is more valuable than a backlink from a low authority domain.
Backlinks are like the currency of the web. Everyone wants them but they’re hard to land and require a lot of cold email outreach as well as relationship building.
How To Get High Domain Authority Backlinks
Here’s how to get high domain authority backlinks:
- Guest Posts
- Link Exchanges
- HARO
- PR
Guest Posts
Guest posting is one of the best ways to land high domain authority backlinks.
Your best shot at landing these types of backlinks is to create a killer pitch that stands out.
You want to shoot for replies like this:
And when you get rejected, which you will, getting replies where they mention how they love your copy or your pitch means you’re on the right track.
High domain authority websites get hammered with guest post pitches every day. The good news is that most of them are terrible.
It’s important to keep your pitch short, sweet, and deliver as much value as humanly possible.
These people are busy and don’t have time to read your 1000 word email. They also don’t care about how “valuable” your piece of content will be for their audience.
If you have to explain how valuable your content will be for their audience, it’s probably not that valuable.
Link Exchanges
If done properly, link exchanges are a great way to score some high authority backlinks.
The trick with link exchanges is to not do them excessively with the same websites.
The prospects that will be most receptive to link exchanges are one’s who are actively doing SEO. They understand the value and they know how difficult it is to get backlinks.
Link exchanges are more common in certain niches. For example, SaaS is probably one of the easiest niches to do link exchanges in. It’s fiercely competitive and typically organic search traffic is one of the best ways to grow so SaaS marketers are more open to these types of requests.
However, if you’re in the food niche, you’re going to struggle to find link exchange partners because most food bloggers don’t thoroughly understand SEO and won’t see the value.
HARO
HARO stands for Help A Reporter Out.
HARO is a great way to land high authority links but has become very saturated.
You’ll need to send a high number of pitches to journalists and hope that they use your answer in their article.
The best tip I can give is to be selective with who you pitch to. Avoid pitching to “anonymous” requests as these sites are typically low authority.
Be wary that not every site will give you a dofollow backlink. Make sure you research the site to see if they give dofollow links before pitching.
It also helps to have some kind of unique credentials to help you stand out and win pitches.
PR
PR is a great way to get high authority backlinks from news sites such as Huffington Post.
However, PR is an art in itself that is much different from traditional strategies like guest posting.
It’s incredibly difficult to break into and it requires you to have a great pitch with unique data to give to journalists.
What’s A Good Domain Authority For Backlinks
A good domain authority for backlinks is 40 and above.
This is just a personal preference. We’ve noticed that anything less than 40 doesn’t really move the needle much.
Domain authority can vary across third party tools.
Ahrefs uses Domain Rating (DR).
Moz uses Domain Authority (DA)
SemRush uses Authority Score (AS)
They all have their own internal algorithms that determine these scores.
However, Google doesn’t actually use these.
These metrics are made up by the tools, but they are the best gauge we have when it comes to comparing domain authority of sites.
How To Find High Authority Domains
First, you’ll need to generate a list of relevant prospects.
To do this, you can:
- Scrape Google Search
- Use Ahrefs Content Explorer
- Export competitor backlinks
Once you’ve come up with a list of websites, you’ll need to filter them by DR or DA.
Ahrefs has a batch analysis tool that allows you to get the DR of 200 websites at once.
But first take your prospect list and remove duplicate domains.
This will save you a boatload of time if your list is greater than 200 websites.
If you don’t have Screaming Frog, break your list up into chunks of 200 sites and do a batch analysis for each chunk.
Once your list is enriched with DR, all you need to do is filter for sites greater than or equal to DR 40.
Caveats
DR is not the end all be all. You should do more due diligence before you decide if a site is worth paying for or going after.
Authority Scores Can Be Gamed
The problem with domain authority scores is that they can be artificially inflated or faked. A lot of guest post farms do this so they can justify charging more money for links.
If the DR is 71 and domain traffic is less than 1K, that’s a dead give away.
Authority Scores Aren’t Everything
Pay attention to relevance and also something called URL Rating (UR).
There are 3 types of relevance.
Here’s how important they are from greatest to least:
- Contextual Relevance
- Page Relevance
- Domain Relevance
In a perfect world, you want to shoot for all three. However, in our experience the two that matter the most are contextual relevance and page relevance.
URL Rating or UR is a measure of a page’s power. UR is an Ahrefs metric that looks at the backlink profile of a single page. It tries to mimic Google’s Pagerank algorithm.
If you can get a link from a high UR page with tons of quality links, it’s much better than getting a link from a high DR website on a brand-new page.
Can You Increase Domain Authority Without Backlinks?
No. Most Domain Authority algorithms specifically look at a website’s backlink profile to create their scores.
It doesn’t matter how much content you write, if your website has no links pointing to it, it’s considered to have low domain authority.
What About Web 2.0s?
Web 2.0s are fake websites built on authoritative subdomains like wordpress.org, medium.com or Google sites.
When creating a Web 2.0, you try to keep it as relevant as possible to the main site without it being an exact copy.
The idea is that you’re sending relevant high domain authority backlinks from the Web 2.0s to your main site.
Are Web 2.0s Still Good For SEO?
These used to work really well a long time ago, however, they’ve become much less effective.
We wouldn’t recommend spending time, energy or effort on a strategy like this.
It may work for you in the short term but it’s only a matter of time before these types of links get devalued and you’re back to square one.
What About Gig Sites Like Fiverr?
There’s a reason why high domain authority backlinks are expensive and hard to get.
If everyone could easily get these links, then they’d no longer be valuable.
So when you see gigs offering these types of links for pennies on the dollar, it’s usually too good to be true.
Getting a link from Forbes, LA Times or Time Magazine can’t be as simple as paying Ajay from India $120.
People have tried these in the past and they’ve either gotten scammed or they’ve been put on sections of these websites that offer self-published articles that are noindexed or nofollow.
Google gives dofollow links credit and ignores nofollow links and noindexed pages in their algorithm so in the end these gigs are pretty much worthless.
Steer clear of using cheap services like this.
Should You Hire Someone To Get High Authority Backlinks?
Of course, we’re a little biased here but the answer is yes. If you want to get ahead, you need reputable experts who you can delegate high domain authority backlinks to.
Instead of trying to do it all yourself, leave it to the experts to get you the results you’re looking for. Contact us today!
