Link Quality Metrics

Metric	Tool	What it Measures
Domain Rating (DR)	Ahrefs	Strength of a domain's backlink profile (0–100)
Domain Authority (DA)	Moz	Predicted ranking ability (0–100)
Trust Flow (TF)	Majestic	Quality of links based on trusted seed sites
Citation Flow (CF)	Majestic	Volume/quantity of links
Spam Score	Moz	Probability of spammy site (0–17)
Traffic	SimilarWeb/Ahrefs	Organic traffic validates real site value

Acquisition Strategies

Create original research, data studies, infographics, or comprehensive guides that others naturally want to cite.

Effort: High | Quality: Very High | Scale: Medium

Respond to journalist queries on Help A Reporter Out, Qwoted, or SourceBottle for editorial backlinks.

Effort: Medium | Quality: Very High | Scale: Low-Medium

Write high-quality articles for relevant blogs in your niche. Target DR 40+ sites with real traffic.

Effort: High | Quality: High | Scale: Medium

Find broken links on relevant sites, create replacement content, notify the webmaster.

Effort: Medium | Quality: High | Scale: Medium

Find "best resources" or "useful tools" pages in your niche and request inclusion.

Effort: Low-Medium | Quality: Medium-High | Scale: High

Launch newsworthy campaigns, data studies, or tools that attract press coverage and editorial links.

Effort: Very High | Quality: Highest | Scale: Low

Attribute	Passes PageRank	Use Case
Default (no attribute)	Yes	Editorial links you vouch for
rel="nofollow"	No (hint)	User-generated content, untrusted links
rel="sponsored"	No (hint)	Paid/sponsored links
rel="ugc"	No (hint)	User-generated content (comments, forums)

Tactic	Risk
Buying links	Manual action penalty from Google
Private Blog Networks (PBN)	Sitewide penalty risk
Excessive exact-match anchor text	Penguin algorithm penalty
Low-quality directory submissions	Negative signal, wasted effort
Comment spam	Flagged as spam, no SEO value