Linking building is an essential part of of optimising your website. Being able to assess a quality link will not only save you lots of time but will give you boost up the SERP’s. It is therefore important to critically examine the site you wish a link from.
Here are my top five things you should consider when evaluating a link source.
1. What is the quality of their inbound links?
When assessing a site you must look at who links to them. Good sites will be listed in the top directories and have quality links pointing towards them. If after analysing a site in Yahoo Site Explorer you see lots of PPC links (porn, pharmaceuticals, casino) appearing near the top of the backlinks then you’ll know that a link from that site will be worthless.
2. Would you link to the site?
When evaluating a sites link worth try thinking of it outside of link building. Critically examine the site in terms of your own needs. Will the site send you much traffic? Would you be happy telling others to use the site? Does the site have interesting and useful content? If you find yourself saying no to all of these questions then the site is not a high value link and you’d be better moving on to something else.
3. Who do they link to?
Just like in real life situations who you recommend or link to reflects your quality of judgement. What would happen if you kept on giving duff recommendation as to where you could eat, holiday etc. That’s right nobody would listen to you any more. The flip side is also true. If what you recommended or linked to was of high quality then people would immediately think that you knew your stuff and would happy to ask you for more recommendations. Search engines treat websites in much the same way. So make sure that the site you want a link from has good quality outbound links too!
4. Is it obvious they are selling links?
If it is then the search engines will know this too and will devalue their links.
5. How well do they rank?
Search engines will usually only rank trusted sites. So if a targeted site ranks then putting some energy into trying to obtain a link should be effort which will be rewarded.
