Top Tips to Examine the Credibility of Backlinks in 2025
You might wonder how to connect your business website to another website, and how SEO services in India manage to rank their websites at the top—even when their sites don't seem to meet the same standards as yours. So, why are they still ranking higher? In this blog, I’ll explain one important reason: backlinks. In SEO India, a backlink is a type of link from one website to another. If another website includes a clickable link that points to your site, then your website has earned a backlink from that site.
Backlinks are one of the most important parts of SEO. When done right, they can help your website climb the search engine rankings and bring in more visitors. But not all backlinks are good. Some can actually harm your site instead of helping it. In fact, certain types of backlinks can lead to penalties or drops in rankings, especially if they’re low-quality or come from suspicious websites. And in some cases, competitors might even use shady tactics like building a bunch of poor-quality links to your site in an attempt to hurt your rankings. This is known as negative SEO. That’s why it’s more important than ever to know how to check backlink quality in 2025.
In this blog, we’ll walk you through how to evaluate the quality of backlinks in a simple and effective way. By the end, you’ll know what to look for, which tools to use, and how to make sure your backlink profile helps—not hurts—your SEO.
1. The first thing to pay attention to when checking backlinks is relevance.
A backlink is more valuable when it comes from a site that’s related to your niche. For example, if you run a fitness blog, getting a backlink from another health or fitness-related site is much better than getting one from a general website that talks about everything from cooking to finance. According to a recent survey by Admix Global, 85% of SEO experts across India, the US, the UK, Europe, and Australia consider relevance to be one of the most important factors when evaluating backlink quality. When a backlink is relevant, it sends a stronger signal to Google that your website is trustworthy and an authority in your field. So always aim to get links from websites that are closely related to your industry.
2. You should check the authority of the website that’s linking to you.
High-authority sites pass more value to your website. Domain Authority (DA) by Moz, Domain Rating (DR) by Ahrefs, and Authority Score (AS) by SEMrush are all metrics that tell you how strong a website is in terms of SEO. These scores are measured on a scale from 1 to 100. The higher the score, the stronger the site. Generally, a score between 50 and 60 is considered good, and anything above that is excellent. According to the same Admix Global survey, 68.3% of SEO professionals say that domain authority is a key metric when judging backlink quality. You can use SEO tools like Moz, Ahrefs, and SEMrush to check these authority scores. Many of these tools are also available as browser extensions, so you can get the data quickly while browsing.
3. Along with authority, you should also look at the traffic of the referring domain.
A website might have a high domain authority, but if no one visits it, the backlink might not be as useful as you think. A site that gets regular, real traffic is usually trusted by both users and search engines. That means any backlinks coming from that site are likely to have more value. Traffic is just as important as domain authority when it comes to assessing link quality. In fact, 68.3% of SEO experts say traffic is a major factor too. You can use tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, or SimilarWeb to see how much traffic a website is getting before accepting a backlink from it.
4. Another important thing to check is the trustworthiness of the referring website.
In today’s SEO world, Google focuses a lot on something called E-E-A-T, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. That means links from sites with a good reputation are far more valuable than links from sketchy or spammy sites. But how can you tell if a site is trustworthy? Start by reading their online reviews. If the site has mostly positive feedback, that’s a good sign. You can also look at their social media presence—are they active and consistent with their posts? Do people engage with their content? Another way to check is by using tools like Google Safe Browsing or Norton Safe Web. These tools can help you avoid sites that may have malware or other security issues. A safe, reliable site builds trust—and that trust gets passed on to your website through the backlink.
5. The anchor text of a backlink also matters a lot.
This is the clickable part of the link, and it helps both users and search engines understand what the linked page is about. Studies show that around 40% of SEO experts look at anchor text to judge backlink quality. If the anchor text is relevant to your content and includes a target keyword or variation of it, that’s a good sign. On the other hand, if the anchor text is random, misleading, or over-optimized, it might look suspicious to search engines. That could even hurt your rankings. Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs can help you analyze the anchor texts in your backlink profile, so you can see which ones are helping and which ones may need fixing.
6. It’s also important to look at the context in which the backlink appears.
Contextual links—those placed naturally within the flow of a well-written article or blog post—are much more valuable than links placed in footers, sidebars, or random link lists. When a backlink is surrounded by relevant content, it shows Google that the link is part of a meaningful piece of information, not just added for SEO purposes. This increases trust and improves your chances of getting ranked higher. For instance, if someone links to your site using the words “algorithm updates” in a blog post about Google SEO changes, and your content expands on that topic, Google is more likely to trust that backlink. Contextual backlinks also improve the user experience by guiding readers to content that’s truly useful.
7. Lastly, don’t forget to check the diversity of your backlink profile.
A natural backlink profile includes links from different types of websites—some big, some small, some with high authority, and some with medium-level scores. This shows Google that your site is gaining attention from a variety of sources, which is a strong signal of credibility. If all your backlinks come from just a handful of sites, or if they all look the same, that could raise red flags. Having a good mix makes your link profile look more natural and organic. Tools like Ahrefs allow you to check backlink diversity and see which types of websites are linking to you.
Final Words:
Checking the quality of backlinks in 2025 is all about understanding a few key factors: relevance, authority, traffic, trustworthiness, anchor text, context, and diversity. When you take the time to evaluate each backlink using these factors, you can avoid harmful links and focus on building a strong, trustworthy backlink profile that boosts your SEO. With the help of tools like SEMrush, Moz, and Ahrefs, this process becomes a lot easier. So, if you’re serious about growing your website the right way, start reviewing your backlinks today—and don’t let bad links hold you back. Top SEO companies in India use these factors to create backlinks for any business website.