Organic traffic as a backlink quality signal

Estimated monthly visits from search, from an independent index that tracks which keywords a domain ranks for and at what position, US English only. It is an estimate, and for a site whose audience is elsewhere it is a low one: a Spanish-language publication with real readers can read as zero. That is why no test in the quality method fires on traffic alone, and why “zero and zero” is never applied as a blanket rule.

Whether a search engine trusts the site enough to send it anyone. A DR 60 with under 100 monthly visits (the first test’s threshold, with a measured rank above 400) is authority in the graph with no consequence in the world. Of the domains our tests reject, the traffic test accounts for a minority; the rest have visitors and fail somewhere less visible, on keywords, spam, subdomain footprint or link ratio. Traffic is necessary evidence, not sufficient.

Yes, and more than rating does at the top. On root domains with a traffic reading, the median ask rises band by band; the Backlink Price Index publishes the medians by traffic band each month. The premium is rational: a publisher with real readers has a business that does not depend on selling links, and sells fewer of them.

• traffic_min in a brief filters on the measured figure where we have one and the claimed one otherwise; verified_only insists on measured.
• Read verified_traffic beside the seller’s claim. The two disagreeing is the tell.
• Do not reject a site on traffic alone if its keywords and referring domains are real and its language is not English; the index is blind there.
• For referral traffic rather than rankings, traffic is the whole question. Ask for the publisher’s topic match and a homepage or contextual placement where readers will see it.