I sat down with Koa Kauwe on Stan Ventures’ SEO On-Air podcast to talk about link quality, and I started by throwing out the metrics most agencies lead with. Domain authority and domain rating are estimations. What I actually ask is whether the linking page has real topical authority, whether the anchor and surrounding content are relevant, and whether the link could plausibly send referral traffic on its own.
We also got into the two-million-dollar link contract that came with no quality standards and produced nothing but PBNs, why I disavow nothing on .edu domains but move fast on my own site, how spammers hijack university subdomains, and how I tie AI citations back to enrollments rather than rankings.
Listen here: What Makes a Good Quality Backlink.