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Ahrefs URL Rating, or UR, is a metric used to gauge the strength of a given page’s backlink profile. It’s measured on a scale from 1 to 100; the higher the number, the stronger the backlink profile. A page’s URL Rating can be checked for free, by entering its URL into Ahrefs’s Website Authority Checker. URL ratings are tracked on a logarithmic scale, meaning that it can be shifted much more easily on the lower end of the scale compared to the higher end. For example, getting a page’s URL rating from 10 to 20 will require much less work than getting a URL rating from 60 to 70. Though what can be considered a “good” UR depends on a lot of factors, such as the age of your site and the level of SEO competition within your industry, URL ratings tend to fall between 40 and 50 on average, with anything higher than that being comparably strong. UR has a positive correlation to rankings on Google, and is calculated using similar factors as Google’s PageRank formula, such as the number of links, the authority of those links’ referring domains, and the links between pages. This data is filtered through similar parameters as PageRank too, such as the way both algorithms respect nofollow html attributes, and both use a damping factor. While the way the URL Rating of a page is determined certainly has similarities with the PageRank algorithm, they’re not identical, and shouldn’t be treated as such. While PageRank has been able to develop over the years on the strength of Google’s massive resources, Ahrefs’ UR algorithm has stayed relatively basic. This is partly because Ahrefs lacks the resources to crawl additional factors on the billions of pages that make up the tool’s index, and partly because the specifics of the PageRank algorithm are deliberately kept secret by Google. URL Rating can be useful during link building campaigns to analyse the relative ranking potential of a specific page. For example, if you’ve published a series of posts on a similar topic and devoted the same amount of link building resources to each page, and one of those pages is showing a URL rating that’s significantly lower than the others, there may be an issue with one of the backlinks.

Contextual links are links that appear within a piece of content with a focus on related topics and ideas that serve to contextualise the link. If, for example, you’re trying to improve the rankings for a page that lists the features of a piece of sales software, and you create a link from a piece of content that has a section on the benefits of using a tool with these capabilities, this would be classified as a contextual link. Contextual link building can be a hugely powerful SEO tactic, as it places a lot of emphasis on topical relevance, and helps to showcase the reliability and authority of the target website. Contextual backlinks are also highly sought after because they can be a powerful source of qualified traffic by virtue of their strong topical relevance. And, even if they don’t bring in masses of traffic, building contextual links in high volumes can help to enhance your brand awareness and trustworthiness, by having mentions of your brand appear on well respected publications.

How SEOs Build Contextual Links

Like any other link building strategy, one of the most effective methods of attracting contextual links is creating high quality content that’s worth linking to. Contextual links generate the most value when they’re pointing to something designed to provide tangible value to a specific audience, and which content creators will feel confident about linking to. Aside from improving your chances of passive link generation over time, this will also help to ensure that more of your backlinks demonstrate strong topical relevance, an increasingly important factor in the way that Google determines the authority and quality of a linked to site. Ultimate guides, thought leadership articles, original case studies, and infographics can all be examples of highly linkable assets, and a long term generators of valuable contextual links. Guest posting is another widely used method for building contextual backlinks, and will usually be a central pillar for a typical contextual link building strategy. Though this will require more effort than passively growing links through publishing high quality content on your own site, it offers a higher degree of control over the referring domains that link to you, and the context in which you frame your links.

Hyperlinks, more commonly known as simply links, are clickable elements used as a reference from one webpage to another. Web users can follow hyperlinks by clicking or tapping on them. Though the original hyperlink definition was restricted to text-based elements, modern hyperlinks can be anchored in images, interactive buttons, and almost any other visual element that can be displayed on a webpage. Hyperlinks are the primary method for web users to navigate from one page to another, and have been a fundamental part of the internet ever since its inception. The HTML document format that all webpages adhere to, and allows for hyperlinks to be embedded in a page’s content, was set out as one of the three protocols of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the internet, as early as 1989. Modern hyperlinks come in a variety of styles. With basic text based hyperlinks, the text that is linked is known as the anchor text. The anchor text of a hyperlink is almost always formatted differently to the surrounding text, traditionally with a blue font colour and an underline. Previously clicked hyperlinks will usually change colour in order to show that the user has already visited the target page. Some hyperlinks will also show a small popup when moused over, known as a tooltip. Understanding hyperlinks is an important part of SEO for two main reasons. The first reason is that backlinks, or inbound links, that point to your site from other pages are one of the main indicators Google uses to assess the value of a webpage, and how it should be ranked in a given page of search results. Google determines the value of a hyperlink based on various factors, such as the words or elements used in its anchor text, the presence of dofollow or nofollow HTML attributes, the age of the link, and more. Google will also look at the referring page’s authority, based on the quality and quantity of its own inbound links, to calculate how a given hyperlink should affect its target page’s rankings. Hyperlinks are also important to SEOs in the context of internal linking, and how a given website is structured through the use of hyperlinks pointing to pages under the same domain. Google’s crawlers will follow links in much the same way a human user does to discover the content on your website, which is one of the first steps in the process of ranking it on Google’s SERPs. If a page on your site doesn’t have any internal hyperlinks pointing to it, or it’s buried so far down the site hierarchy that it’s hard for crawlers to reach within your site’s crawl budget, it will have a much lower chance of gaining a strong rank on a page of search results. SEOs can help a site’s chances of ranking both by organising its content into a logical, crawler friendly site structure, and by building backlinks through the creation of high quality, authoritative content both onsite and externally.