Good vs. Bad Backlinks
 

I know not all backlinks are "good", but my question is: would a backlink from a website whose Alexa ranking is, let's say, 5 million even help me in the long run?

I got a guy who says his website gets 15K a week, but his Alexa is less than 6 million. (They own multiple sites so obviously their traffic is probably only referral) - Still, the numbers just don't add up in my head. I swing around 5K to 10K a week on a 4 month old site, but even my alexa is not nearly as bad as theirs.

1) What's going on here?

2) Should Alexa ranking always be considered when link trading?

3) What else should be taken into consideration?

Thanks :thumbsup

I need clarification for nothing more than my own curiosity. Is that 15k users, sessions, pageviews?

What kind of links are you trading?

It could be that the site is very new or they had a recent boost in traffic and the Alexa rank hasn't caught up yet. You could ask to see their analytics

The things i would look personally at are:

- Domain Authority
- Age of the site
- How relevant is the content
- Position of the backlink
- Number of outbound links already on the page

Try checking the traffic using similarweb it is way better than alexa.

SimilarWeb, Alexa metrics has nothing to do with SEO.

That`s spot on

I should have been more descriptive in the post. 15K individual users. Just trading hardlinks.

Thanks for all the suggestions and tips. Very helpful. Going to check out SimilarWeb when I get the chance.

as smeklinis says, neither have little to do with SEO...

It´s the content and the site itself, it´s your site posts, index, the words used, especially in the head :thumbsup

When I am looking for backlinks I look at these things:

1. Ahrefs UR of refering page + manual review of backlinks to referring page - it should be not a spam and should have backlinks itself (i am talking about dofollows).

2. OBL of referring page - if it has many of it - it will pass very low link juice to your site.

3. I am not looking at traffic of referring page -
https://ahrefs.com/blog/links-with-traffic-study/

Most of link seller are mentioning high traffic to their sites and due to this they rise prices of links to rocket high.
As about traffic - I have couple of sidebar links from homepages of sites with 7-10M monthly traffic. And i have ~60 clicks monthly from that links :)
People goes to porn sites for masturbation, not for reading content and clicking some links.