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We're using Moz and Ahrefs to monitor backlinks that we're getting to Siftery.

Given that there are so many factors that affect the potential quality of a backlink - domain authority, page authority, context, anchor text, etc. - is there a single metric that attempts to quantify the value of a link? I realize that this would be an inexact science, but it would be a helpful view to get a quick directional sense of what are our most valuable backlinks (and be able to tie it to the campaigns that led to them, for example).

If there's no "single metric" out there, are there heuristics that people have withstood the test of time?

Thanks for your help!

At Siftery (siftery.com) we have about 250k pages, most of them reflected in our sitemap. Though after submitting a sitemap we started seeing an increase in the number of pages Google indexed, in the past few weeks progress has slowed to a crawl at about 80k pages, and in fact has been coming down very marginally.

Due to the nature of the site, a lot of the pages on the site likely look very similar to search engines. We've also broken down our sitemap into an index, so we know that most of the indexation problems are coming from a particular type of page (company profiles).

Given these facts below, what do you recommend we do? Should we de-index all of the pages that are not being picked up by the Google index (and are therefore likely seen as low quality)? There seems to be a school of thought that de-indexing "thin" pages improves the ranking potential of the indexed pages. We have plans for enriching and differentiating the pages that are being picked up as thin (Moz itself picks them up as 'duplicate' pages even though they're not.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and experiences!