What Link Building Metrics Are Most Important in 2025?

In 2025, link-building will remain a pillar of SEO success. Companies will continue to rely on web links to increase their domain authority, drive high-value traffic to their pages, and rank higher in search results.

Several SEO strategies will dominate the link-building agenda, like AI-powered outreach personalization, link insertion in high-performing content, user intent relevance, and brand mentions to backlink conversion. Companies that prioritize these strategies will likely gain a significant competitive boost.

But how can you ensure these and other strategies bring you the desired outcomes for your company? By monitoring, measuring, and adjusting your link building strategies. 

Let’s break down the key link metrics that can help you with that.

Authority of the Linking Domain (DA & DR)

Authority of the linking domain is measured through Domain Authority (DA), which is a metric commonly used by Moz, and Domain Rating (DR), which is favored by Ahrefs. Both are often used interchangeably and are useful indicators of a site’s overall strength.

Less is more, SEO pundits often say, which is so true for links from domains with high DA and DR ratings. A single link from a high authority domain carries more value (in SEO, this is called link equity or link juice) than five or more links from low authority ones with tarnished reputations.

How to use it:

Prioritize links from domains with DA/DR of 70+ for better SEO results.
Don’t completely ignore lower DR sites if they’re highly relevant and receive organic traffic.

Use SEO automation tools, preferably with AI onboard, like Surfer SEO, Ahrefs, or Moz, to check domain metrics like authority and rating.

Beware of high-DA spam domains, though, and don’t entirely rely on AI-powered SEO assistants, as their level of discretion is nowhere near human. Some unscrupulous domains artificially inflate their ratings using spam and cheating techniques (mass directory submissions, link farms). 

Therefore, discretion and critical thinking are your best friends in the world of SEO automation.

Relevance of the Linking Domain

As mentioned earlier, SEO strategies that emphasize content relevance are going to dominate the link building in 2025 and most likely beyond. Google and other leading search engines and their algorithms start to prioritize contextual relevance like never before.

In connection to link building metrics, it means that a link from a high authority (as measured by DA or DR) website may actually be less valuable than a link from a lower authority website but highly relevant to the niche of your business. 

Moreover, too many links from irrelevant resources can signal to the smart Google’s algorithms that spammy tactics are involved. This will reduce the impact of your SEO efforts and your website’s ranking.

Here is how you can use relevance of the linking domain effectively:

Ensure the linking website comes from within your industry or a closely related niche.
Avoid backlinks from random, unrelated websites, even if they have high DA/DR. 
Use SEO tools like Majestic’s Topical Trust Flow to measure a site’s topical relevance.
Prioritize focus on target audience by placing links naturally within content.

In gaining recognition of your website through guest posting service, aim to target those domains that exhibit high relevance to your industry or niche. Also, ensure your guest post and link’s URL naturally fit the hosting site’s audience and industry.

Traffic from the Referring Domain

Why all these efforts with domain authority link building and relevance if not for the traffic? Organic traffic that you get from the linking domain is the main goal. 

A backlink cannot generate much traffic if the linking site doesn’t have such traffic in the first place. Therefore, backlinks from domains with high traffic are potentially more valuable to your SEO than even from more relevant, but less crowded ones.

The benefits for you are not only the prospective customers, but also a higher credibility from Google, as websites with high organic traffic enjoy higher search ranking.

Long story short, here is how to use traffic from the referring domain with maximum return:

Target backlinks from domains with at least 10,000 monthly organic visitors.
Prioritize pages on your website that already rank well and receive steady organic traffic.
Go after the links from resources with high web reputation, which are more likely to be clicked by real users.
Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or SimilarWeb to evaluate a site’s monthly traffic, before placing your backlinks.

Keep in mind that the backlink you place is only as good as the referring domain. If the domain is irrelevant to your industry, it won’t do much good to your SEO. For example, a backlink located on a high-traffic fishing tackle website won’t bring much value to your kids’ toys business. 

Anchor Text Optimization

In a high-performance SEO, not only keywords must be relevant to the search engines and users, but also the so-called anchor text. The latter is the clickable text used in the hyperlink that is usually highlighted in blue underscored formatting. An anchor can be a single word or number or a phrase.

In an ideal world of metrics for link building, an optimized anchor text should be balanced, i.e., not overly optimized with exact match keywords (which can trigger spam filters), and not too generic (e.g., “follow this link”).

Some of the best practices in anchor texts optimization are:

For a natural backlink profile, keep a fair mixture of anchors. For example, partial-matched text, generic anchors and branded anchors.
Maintain the exact-matching anchor to keyword text under 15%, which is the current search engine “preference”.
Prioritize anchor text that is descriptive and relevant over the generic one. For example, “car enthusiasts says that…”, as opposed to “click here”.

Anchor texts with exact-matching keywords are equally dangerous as a vague or generic anchor texts. When used too often, Google will suspect manipulative tactics and may penalize your website by lowering its ranking power.

Link Diversity

Diversity of a workforce makes for more productive work. The same is true in link building. Search engine algorithms favor healthy link profiles, the one that show more diversity, when backlinks are coming from diverse sources like editorial mentions, resource pages, guest posts, digital PR, and others.

Unnatural backlinks that only lead to a single type of external resource (e.g., blog posts) may trigger fraud/manipulation receptors in the ever-smart Google’s search “brains”.

You can achieve maximum link diversity with these approaches:

Include a variety of resources into your link-building strategy (guest posts, directories and resource pages, niche forums, review sites, editorial mentions, etc.).
Diversify your link-building domain profile, e.g., include a fair mixture of /com, /edu, /gov, and /org.
Run regular check on the health of your link profile with Ahrefs, Google Search Console or similar SEO tools.

Chasing diversity, don’t forget about relevance, quality and contemporary Google’s best practices. Carefully check all your resources for spammy content, relevance to your specific niche and double-check if they violate any Google’s policies. 

For instance, Google once used to favor links placed on forums and review sites, however, as of the start of 2025, excessive backlinks from forums may lead to penalties.

Link Velocity

In 2025, search engines will increasingly favor natural website behaviors and punish suspicious ones. Link velocity, or the rate at which your website gains links is one of the link metrics that Google will evaluate in this respect.

If you gain backlinks unnaturally fast, let’s say you had 45 yesterday, and today you have 245 — this spike is likely to be viewed by his “smart majesty” Google as suspicious behavior, potentially involving spammy tactics.

On the contrary, a stead and natural growth of backlink mass will indicate a health new vs. old links velocity and Google will rank your pages higher in SERPs.

This is how to use link velocity to your benefit:

Aim for incremental, natural growth rate rather than sudden surges in backlink mass.
If you need to grow new links fast, ensure they come from relevant, trustful sources to avoid red flags from Google.

Track new vs. old backlinks balance regularly using SEO tools like SEMrush, or Google Search Console.

The above-mentioned SEO tools will allow you to also notice an accidental drop in backlinks, if affected by a Google penalty. Sudan drops are unlikely to happen due to natural causes, such as manual removal, or loss due to a site update.

Sometimes, when your content goes viral, this can trigger an abnormal influx of backlinks. While not necessarily being bad, the effect can be similar of that to using spammy techniques. The best safeguard measure here is to ensure your traffic comes from authoritative, high-quality resources.

The Key Takeaway

In 2025 link building metrics will follow the natural backlink growth patterns, and old-time faithful off-page SEO practices, such as content relevance, domain authority, traffic volume, and diversity.

If you want to maintain the good health of your backlink profile, you have no choice but to rely on the modern SEO tools. That’s the key takeaway from today’s post. 

For example, Ahrefs and SEMrush can automate the monitoring of metrics for link building on your website and help to grow your link mass. Surfer SEO, on the other hand, with its advanced AI algorithms can analyze your website content relevance and optimize your outreach strategy for securing contextually relevant backlinks.