Many seasoned SEO folks have very specific metrics that they want to see when selecting which publishers they want to be receiving a link from. However, not all of our clients are hardcore SEO nerds and understanding a bunch of silly acronyms can be a bit daunting.

Throughout this article, we will briefly touch on some of the metrics that are typically used in the industry but let's start with the basics.

If you are looking for quality publishers to work with and eventually receive a link back to your website, we believe the most important factor is to find publishers that have organic traffic going to their website. This is a key sign that they are ranking for relevant keywords within their niche otherwise Google would not be showing them to users, hence a potential trusted source.

How do we know if people are visiting their website?

We trust the data that's collected from our friends at Ahrefs and they help give us an estimate of how much organic traffic a site receives. Here is a link to an article from Tim at Ahrefs which explains this a bit more.

And here is traffic explained:

This metric estimates how much organic search traffic the target website, subsection or web page gets each month.

How is it calculated?

If that's not enough for you, we have a number of other tools we use to measure the authority of a domain which are all presented in your dashboard and easily available when you are approving publishers.

Domain Rating (DR) shows the strength of a target website’s backlink profile on a logarithmic scale from 0 to 100, with the latter being the strongest.

This is the number of websites that have 1 or more links pointing at the publisher's domain

Trust Flow is a metric trademarked by Majestic that analyses how trustworthy a site is by measuring its quality. Quality is the essential data of this metric. If a link pointing to your website is authoritative and qualitative, then your trust flow will increase.

Citation Flow is a metric trademarked by Majestic that refers to the popularity of a link in a site without considering the quality of these links. The perfect example is porn sites. They have a very high Citation Flow but these links are often not qualitative. A website with a lot of links pointing to it will be influential and will get a good citation flow.

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs). A Domain Authority score ranges from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.

Here are just a handful of the metrics to consider when choosing the next publisher that you want to work with. Keep in mind that you want to keep your backlink profile looking as natural as possible, so don't think that just going to a lot of high-authority highly relevant publishers is going to solve all your troubles.

If you have any questions, please reach out to the NO-BS Support Team. Here's an article on how to contact us.