What this module is for
Module 1 explained what a link is and what it does. This module answers the question that follows: given two link opportunities, how do you tell which one is worth having? That is where most link building goes wrong, and it goes wrong predictably. People adopt whichever number their tool puts in the biggest font, filter every opportunity by it, and end up with a profile that scores well in a spreadsheet and does nothing in search results.
There is a structural reason for this. The link industry sells what it can count. Domain Rating, Domain Authority, Trust Flow and Citation Flow are countable, so they appear in every proposal you will ever receive. Relevance is not countable in the same way, so nobody prices it — and because nobody prices it, buyers stop asking about it. I have reviewed proposals that specified a minimum Domain Rating and a maximum price per link and said nothing about subject matter. That is not a quality standard. It is a purchasing standard dressed up as one.
The four questions this module teaches you to ask
Judging a link is not one judgment. It is four, and they are independent. A link can pass any one and fail the rest.
- Is it relevant? Is the site about your subject, is the page about your subject, and does the paragraph containing the link make sense to a human reader? This is lesson 2.1, and it comes first because it is the one that gets skipped.
- Is the site actually authoritative? Third-party metrics are estimates built from the link graph, not measurements of quality. Lesson 2.2 explains what each is computed from and what each cannot see.
- Is the page alive? A link on a page that is not indexed, gets no traffic, and has nothing linking to it is a link in name only. Lesson 2.3 covers how to check.
- Who runs this site? Lesson 2.4 is forensic work: registrant records, hosting, analytics IDs, template fingerprints, publication patterns. This is how you identify a network before you join it rather than after.
Lesson 2.5 puts the four together into a written rubric with weights you choose, calibrated against links you already have. A rubric matters less because it is precise and more because it is consistent. Consistency is what lets you look back later and work out which judgments were sound.
A warning about false precision
Nothing here produces a number that is true in any absolute sense. Trust Flow is not a measurement of trustworthiness the way a thermometer measures temperature; it is one company's model of its own crawl of the web. A rubric score is not a prediction of ranking impact. Both are decision aids. Their value is that they make you look at the same things every time and write down what you concluded.
Be willing to say a candidate is bad. Most are. The most useful output of a quality process is the links you never build.
The lessons
- 2.1Relevance: the metric nobody sells youWhy relevance outranks every metric, and how to judge it at three levels.
- 2.2Authority metrics and their limitsWhat each authority metric is built from, what it misses, and how to read TF/CF.
- 2.3Traffic, indexation, and whether the page is aliveHow to verify a linking page is indexed, visited and internally linked before you commit.
- 2.4Reading a site for footprintsForensic checks that reveal when several independent-looking sites are one operation.
- 2.5Building a scoring rubric you will actually useA weighted scoring rubric for link prospects, and how to calibrate it on your own data.
Module checklist
Run every link opportunity through this before you spend an hour, a favor, or a dollar on it.
- Name the topic the linking site is actually about, in one sentence, without using the words "general" or "lifestyle".
- Check that the specific page — not just the site — covers the subject your page covers.
- Read the paragraph the link would sit in and ask whether a reader would click it.
- Pull Trust Flow and Citation Flow together and look at the ratio, not either number alone.
- Compare the site's Topical Trust Flow categories against your own subject.
- Confirm the exact URL is indexed in Google, not just the home page.
- Look for internal links pointing at the page; an orphaned page passes almost nothing.
- Check the publication cadence and whether posts have named, traceable authors.
- Look at the About page, the contact details, and whether a real organization is behind the site.
- Check registrant, hosting, analytics and ad IDs when several candidate sites look suspiciously alike.
- Score the opportunity against your written rubric and record the score, so you can audit your judgment later.
- Reject anything that only scores well on one dimension, however impressive that dimension looks.