Donor (linking site)
The site on which an external link to your resource is placed. The quality of the donor directly affects the value of the link.
In brief
In SEO, a donor is a website or page that contains a hyperlink pointing to your site. The donor's characteristics (traffic, topical relevance, no penalties) determine how much link equity is passed.
What is a donor
The site on which a link to your resource is placed. Donor quality affects the weight of the link.
Donor quality
A good donor has:
- Growing organic traffic
- Topical relevance to your site
- No filters or penalties
- A low number of outgoing SEO links
How to evaluate donors
- Check DR (Ahrefs) or DA (Moz) — but don't take them as absolute
- Look at organic traffic via SEMrush or Similarweb
- Make sure the site is not over‑optimised
- Assess whether the donor links to spammy resources
What to avoid
- Buying links from donors with low traffic but high DR
- Using donors from a different niche
- Placing links on pages with thousands of other outgoing links (directories, unmoderated forums)
Even a perfect donor will not help if the link is nofollow or sits in a footer/sidebar on every page — Google often devalues such links.
FAQ
Common questions
For Google, topical relevance is often more important than abstract DR. A link from a site in a similar niche carries more weight than from a high‑authority but unrelated portal.
Yes, but Google may count only the first link or distribute the equity. Place links from different pages of the donor if natural.
See if the site is indexed (site:donor.com). Check for manual actions in GSC (if accessible). Look for sharp traffic drops in SEMrush.
The more outgoing links on a page, the less equity each passes. If there are hundreds, the link is nearly useless.
Diversity is usually better. One very strong donor can be useful, but a natural backlink profile includes links from different sites of varying authority levels.
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