Welcome aboard. This is your warm-up before the live session: the concepts, a few games to practise on, and a real hands-on Ahrefs task at the end. Nobody's turning you into an SEO. You just need to open a domain, tell if it's decent, and smell a rotten one from across the room. Do that and you're 90% of the way there.
Ahrefs crawls the web all day and writes down who links to whom. One site linking to another is a backlink. Google reads backlinks like votes: when lots of trusted sites point at a page, Google figures it's worth ranking.
Bazoom sells those votes. So your entire world boils down to one question: would placing a client's link here actually help them? Ahrefs is how you answer it. Everything below is just learning to read the scoreboard.
A link from a strong, real, relevant site helps. A link from a weak or fake one does nothing, or quietly hurts. The whole gig is telling those two apart.
Open a domain in Ahrefs and you get hit with a wall of numbers. Most of them aren't your problem. These five are.
Overall strength of a site's link profile. Bigger number, stronger domain. It's the first thing everyone glances at, and the first thing people over-trust.
DR's little sibling. Same concept, but for one page instead of the whole site. Handy when you know the exact article the link will sit on.
Ahrefs' guess at how many people land on the site from Google each month. Honestly, this one often matters more than DR. Big DR with a flatline for traffic? That's a domain wearing a costume. The DR got pumped up on junk links and nobody actually visits.
How many different sites link in. 500 links from one site barely register. Links from 500 separate sites is the real deal. Spread beats repetition.
How many search terms the site shows up for on Google. Lots of relevant keywords means a living, breathing site doing its job.
Please never judge a site on DR alone. I will know. The trio that actually tells the truth is DR + Traffic + Referring Domains, read together. Strong on all three = real. Strong on one, empty on the rest = someone gamed it.
Two words get mixed up constantly, and getting them straight makes everything else click. A backlink is a single link. A referring domain is a whole website that links to you, no matter how many times. One site can give you twenty backlinks, but it's still just one referring domain.
This is why 3 links from 3 different sites beats 20 links from 1 site. Google cares how many different people vouch for you, not how loudly one does. When you're judging a domain, referring domains is the honest headcount.
You don't need the maths, but knowing the shape of it kills a lot of confusion. DR is Ahrefs' own score (not Google's), built almost entirely from the link side of things:
Notice what's not in there: traffic, content quality, relevance. DR is a pure link-popularity score. That's exactly why a site can score DR 70 with 100 visitors, someone pointed a lot of links at it, and Ahrefs faithfully counted them. DR tells you about links. Only traffic tells you about people. You need both, which is the whole point of this guide.
Domain lands on your desk. Before you do anything clever, run this pass. You want a site that's strong, real, and relevant to the client. All three.
A DR 45 site that's genuinely about your client's topic often beats a DR 75 site about everything and nothing. Relevance is quality. Remember this when a client sulks about a "lower" number, higher isn't the same as better.
These are the "hmm" and "absolutely not" patterns. Once you've seen them on a chart a few times, you'll spot them instantly.
Two or more flags and the client still wants it? Bring it to me or the SEO team, don't quietly approve it to keep everyone happy. A bad link is a mess we all end up cleaning later. Nobody's ever been in trouble for asking.
These are real decisions, dressed up as a quiz. Pick an answer, you get the reasoning either way. There's a scoreboard keeping count, no pressure. (Okay, a little pressure.)
Site B, all day. Site A is the costume domain in the flesh: shiny DR held up by 4,200 links, but 120 visitors a month means those links are smoke. Site B has a humbler DR and an actual audience. Traffic proves life. Every time.
Option 2. Relevance is quality. A link from a genuine finance site tells Google "these two belong together" far louder than a giant site about everything. Bigger isn't better, fitting is better. (Option 1 isn't garbage, relevance is just the tiebreaker.)
Flag it. Real sites earn links like they earn grey hairs, slowly. A vertical spike plus 400 visitors screams bulk-bought links. This is a "let me check with the team" moment, not an approve-and-forget.
Check traffic and relevance. A big DR is an invitation to look closer, not a green light. Plenty of DR 90 sites are inflated husks or wildly off-topic. Same drill as always: does it have real visitors, and does it fit the client? Then celebrate.
Pause on it. A UK site pulling most of its audience from somewhere unrelated is a classic tell for fake or bought traffic, or a site that isn't what it claims. Big traffic number, wrong shape. Dig into the countries breakdown before you commit.
The tidy one. A page firing out 400 links spreads its "vote" into a thin mist, and pages like that are often link farms anyway. A page with a handful of clean, deliberate links passes real value. This one's more advanced, so don't sweat it if it caught you, just file it away.
Here's a trick the numbers can't give you. Open a domain's Organic Keywords in Ahrefs and read the top few. Those keywords are the site's real identity, no matter what the homepage claims. A "lifestyle blog" ranking for online casino and best slots is a gambling site wearing a cardigan.
This matters because relevance is half of a good placement. Two rules, straight from how we brief it:
If a site ranks for "online casino" and "best slots", it's a strong casino placement. If it ranks for "baby clothes" and "cheap shoes", it's probably wrong for a casino or forex client, no matter how good its DR looks.
One more column worth a glance: Keyword Difficulty (KD). Some keywords are easy to rank for, some are brutally competitive. A site ranking for genuinely hard keywords has earned real authority. You don't need to master KD, just know that ranking for competitive terms is a good sign.
A client appears at the top. Then domains flash up with their top keywords. Your call: good fit or wrong niche? This is exactly the judgement in Table 3 of your task sheet.
This is the muscle you'll use daily. A domain flashes up with its stats. You call it: Approve, Investigate, or Reject. Fast. Trust the gut check you just learned.
Everything above was practice with made-up numbers. This is the real thing: open Ahrefs, open the Bazoom marketplace, and evaluate actual sites. There are no wrong answers, we want to see your thinking. Do this before the live session and bring it with you.
Log into Ahrefs and just click around. Don't analyse anything seriously yet, get comfortable with where things live.
Pick any 5 websites from the Bazoom marketplace. Open each in Ahrefs Site Explorer and fill in three tables. For each site, find its DR, monthly traffic, primary and secondary country, 2-year traffic trend, top 3 keywords, whether those keywords are relevant, and any red flags.
For each of the 5 sites, a few sentences each:
Good: DR 30+, steady or growing traffic, real content, traffic from multiple countries, relevant keywords. Red flag: DR dropped suddenly, traffic fell off a cliff, nearly all traffic from one odd country, or high DR with low traffic (the site may have bought links or lost rankings). And always: match the primary traffic country to where the client wants to rank.
Pick one of your 5 sites. In Site Explorer, open Competing domains (sites ranking for similar keywords), take the top 3, and compare all four on DR, traffic, primary country, top keywords, trend, referring domains, and whether any look spammy. Then answer:
If you're unsure about anything, ask. That's what the team is here for. Nobody expects you to get every call right on day one, that's literally what the live session is for.
Prefer the spreadsheet version to type into? It's the file this guide was built from, ask me and I'll hand you the blank table to fill in.
Reading only gets you so far. These are shows where link building actually gets talked about like grown-ups, no fluff. Bonus: a couple of them have our own Head of SEO on them, so you'll hear exactly how we think about this stuff at Bazoom.
The single most useful episode for you. Tamara and Björn get into why backlinks are still one of SEO's most argued-about topics, why the market keeps growing despite Google's warnings, and why link building today is about relevance, context and brand mentions, not just do-follow links and DR. Everything this guide taught you, expanded by the person who'll be training you.
Another chance to hear Tamara talk shop in a more conversational setting. Good for picking up the instincts and vocabulary of how an experienced SEO reasons through link decisions, which is exactly the muscle you're building.
Tamara joins Austin to talk modern SEO and link strategy. Worth it to round out the picture and hear the same ideas framed for a slightly different audience.
Once the basics click, these are solid, reputable shows that regularly cover links, authority and how search is changing. Don't rush to them, nail the fundamentals first, then let these keep you current.
Can't find an episode? Search the show name plus "Tamara Novitović" on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, or just ask me and I'll dig up the link.
Bring anything that felt fuzzy to the live session, that's what it's for. We'll open real Bazoom domains and you'll make the calls out loud. If you want to wander through Ahrefs' own explainers first, theirs are actually good, not just filler:
Straight from ahrefs: SEO Glossary → · What is Domain Rating →