How to Get High-Quality Backlinks With the TRUST Formula [Case Study]

But, two years down the line, are maps still bringing the backlink bacon home?

In a word:

Yup.

this map shows

At the end of my previous post, I also promised a case study.

(sorry it’s a little late)

So today, I’m going to walk you step-by-step through:

Combining data and simple visuals

Picking up high-quality backlinks.

Backlinks from major publications like:

USA Today (DR92)

News.com.au (DR90)

Yahoo Sports (DR89)

City AM (DR84)

Ready? Let’s go!

Links & Trust

When I conduct a link building campaign I have two goals in mind:

1. Boosting the site’s “link juice”/authority

You’re reading an article about link building on Ahrefs blog. You don’t need me to tell you that you need links to rank in Google.

There’s a clear correlation between the number of links pointing to a site and its ability to rank for a broad spread of keywords.

Tim recently made a pretty chart for this study, showing just that…

referring domains vs organic search traffic ahrefs content explorer

Ahrefs’ Domain Rating (DR) is a good indicator of the strength of a site’s overall link profile.

ahrefs domain rating

Domain Rating (DR) for ahrefs.com, in Ahrefs Site Explorer

2. Building trust with Google

Google’s algorithm is a complex beast.

Are there 200 ranking factors? 300? Honestly, these days there are probably thousands. And with RankBrain, the factors influencing search results can even vary from query to query.

But one thing’s for sure:

If you want to get more search traffic, you need to gain Google’s trust.

Links are a big part of that.

Wait… What’s The Difference?

The easiest way to explain this is to use two of Ahrefs’ key metrics: DR and UR.

ur dr

In case you don’t know:

DR: stands for “Domain Rating” and is the overall authority/strength of a website, taking into account its entire backlink profile.

UR: stands for “URL Rating” and is the strength of an individual URL, factoring in its direct backlinks (and some authority from the site).

So what does this mean?

Technically, a link from a page with a higher UR could pass more immediate “link juice”, even if it’s on a site with a lower DR.

This seems a little confusing, so here are two examples:

First, we have a link from a DR91 site. We can see the linking page has a UR of 31.

high dr1

And next, we have a link from a lower DR site (63). But this time we’ve got a higher UR of 42.

high ur1

So which link is best?

Well, these are both great links. But ignoring things like relevance for now, and going solely on metrics…

For “link juice”: the high UR link

For “trust”: the high DR link

The high UR link should give us a quicker ranking boost. It has more immediate power to pass.

But the high DR link is likely to increase our site’s authority over time.

If high authority sites are willing to reference and link to our site, we’re demonstrating to Google that we are a resource they can trust.

WHY WE KNOW TRUST IS IMPORTANT

One of the best ways to get an insight into the workings of Google’s algorithm is to look at their patents.

We included SEO By The Sea in our recent rundown of the best SEO blogs. And that’s because no-one on planet Earth is better at figuring out what Google’s patents mean for SEO than Bill Slawski.

Back in April, Bill revealed that Google had filed a continuation on a patent initially granted in 2006. The 2006 patent was an update to their original PageRank algorithm.

In this new model, Google proposed defining a set of “seed pages” for various topics.

The power of a link could then be calculated by defining how far removed the linking page is from one of these seed pages. A bit like the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon for backlinks.

A link graph structure of web pages

That diagram is a little complex. And you should read Bill’s post for a full explanation. But in a nutshell:

The fewer steps there are from a “seed page” to your page, the better. You want a low Bacon number.

Now we don’t know exactly what these seed pages are. But we can be sure they are going to be on trusted, established websites.

Bottom line:

Trust matters to Google. And links from authority sites is how you get it.

Got it? Great. So how do we get those authoritative, high DR backlinks?

The 5-Step Formula For High-Quality, Trust-Building Backlinks

Link building is tough.

But we can make it easier by following battle-tested processes.

The formula below is one I’ve used again and again to pick up high-quality backlinks from authority sites: