"We Almost Wasted Time on a 'High DA' Backlink List — Here's What We Do Instead"

We recently got handed a few "high DA/PA backlink list" spreadsheets — the kind you can find all over SEO forums, with hundreds of sites ranked by Domain Authority and Page Authority. Before submitting our site to any of them, we decided to actually evaluate what we were looking at. Here's what we found, and how we're approaching backlinks instead.

The problem with DA/PA backlink lists

At first glance, a list of sites with DA 80-95 looks like a goldmine. But when we actually looked closer:

• Many were generic web directories from the early 2010s (pre-Panda/Penguin era) — the kind Google's algorithm updates specifically targeted
• Several were regional clones of the same platform (Craigslist variants for a dozen different cities, .com.ar directory networks that were clearly the same operator)
• High DA sites like Amazon or eBay don't even accept "backlink submissions" in the first place — they were just noise in the list
• Page Authority (PA) on most of these was surprisingly low (30-45), which usually signals a link farm rather than a genuinely authoritative page

None of this means DA/PA numbers are useless — it means a spreadsheet of them, stripped of context, tells you almost nothing about whether a link is worth having.

What we check before it counts as a "quality" link

1. Relevance — does the site's audience actually overlap with ours (marketing/dev/business), or is it a generic directory that accepts anything?
2. Real traffic — is this a site people actually browse, or just a database of submitted links?
3. Spam score — a quick Moz check for spam score and trust metrics catches a lot of the link-farm pattern early.
4. Follow vs nofollow — nofollow links (common on classifieds, forums, many directories) still carry referral traffic and brand value, but shouldn't be counted the same as genuine dofollow authority links.

What we're doing instead

Rather than chasing bulk directory submissions, we shifted to:

• Publishing genuine technical content on platforms like Dev.to and Hashnode — real case studies from our own work (PageSpeed optimization, SEO fixes), not promotional posts
• Business directories that actually vet listings — GoodFirms, Clutch — where the traffic is people actively looking for an agency, not a bulk-scraped link list
• Cross-promoting on LinkedIn to get real eyes on the content, which matters more for referral traffic than the backlink itself
• Tracking in Google Search Console, not just a rank tracker — actual impressions, clicks, and query data tell you far more than a DA number ever will

What we learned from Search Console along the way

A few things surprised us once we started actually watching the data instead of assuming:

• Most of our early impressions were brand-name searches, not the topic keywords we expected
• One blog post ended up indexed under two slightly different URLs (trailing slash mismatch) — a reminder that even small technical details affect how cleanly Google reads your site
• Broad, competitive keywords ("best X in [city]") are unrealistic to expect quick movement on for a newer site — long-tail, specific content earns visibility faster

Takeaway

If someone hands you a "1000 high DA backlinks" list, open it before you use it. A handful of genuinely relevant links will do more for you than hundreds of unrelated directory submissions — and it won't put your site at risk of looking manipulative to Google.

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We're BrandLumeo, a digital marketing agency working across Kerala and Dubai. Curious how others evaluate backlink opportunities before committing time to them!