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Guide to Link Building Pt.3

26 October 2006
Written by: Posted under SEO: Link Building

Evaluating Potential Link Sources
Evaluating the quality of potential link sources is an essential skill for effective link development. Carefully pre-qualifying link sources maximizes cost-effectiveness of the campaign by contacting only the most highly qualified link sources, but just as importantly, it also helps insure that we’re not requesting links from sites that may be considered “bad neighborhoods” by Google.

Evaluating the Site

• What is the topic of the site?
Links from sites on related topics or industries are most effective. A link to a real estate site from a Real Estate or Investing site will provide benefit, a link from a Travel site will likely not.

• How long has the site been online?
Links from older websites provide considerable benefits. Use the ‘SEO for Firefox’ tool combined with a Google search for the website URL to determine site age.

• Does the site have existing outlinks?
If a site does not currently have outlinks to other sites it may be difficult to convince them to add yours. That said, you typically get the best results from sites that only link out to a few sites, provided that your site is one of those few of course.

• Are the site’s current outlinks pointing to pages that are on topic?
Make sure that any existing outlinks are to pages that are on topic. Pages that link off-topic (ex: Real Estate pages which link to ‘low cost hosting’ or ‘online casino’ pages) should be avoided at all costs as they are likely ‘bad neighborhoods’.

• Does the site engage in large-scale linking or link exchanges?
When looking for link sources, the ideal candidate site is an older, on-topic website that links to only a few external pages. Links from these websites provide maximum benefit with minimal risk of being associated with bad neighborhoods. Sites that operate large ‘links’ pages or run automated link exchanges will not provide good results and should be avoided. The exception to this rule are a few focused, industry-specific directory sites such as Reals.com – a Real Estate directory online since February 1998.

Evaluating the Page

• What is the importance of the page in the site hierarchy?
When evaluating the link value of a specific page pay attention to where the page exists in the hierarchy of the website. Links from a homepage tend to pass extra link value as the homepage is typically the page most often linked to by other webmasters. Following this same line of thought, a sub-page directly linked to from the homepage will pass greater value than a page two or more links deep into the site navigation.

• How many outlinks are on the page?
When evaluating a link for the possible PageRank benefit you’ll want to look at how many other external links are already on the page. The Google PageRank equation essentially distributes the PageRank score of a given page across all of the links leaving the page. If a page has 10 links out each link will receive 10% of the total PageRank points. If a page only has 4 links each will receive 25%. This is an oversimplification since it doesn’t take into account the damping factor and internal links, but you get the idea.

• Are the outlinks all ‘direct’ links? A key consideration where evaluating the page is the kind of external links used. Some larger sites and directories use internal redirection scripts when linking to outside pages. These scripts allow sites to track outbound click events, but they also block nearly all the benefits we’re looking to obtain from the link. For our purposes we need to get standard, direct, non Java-Scripted links. The easiest way to verify the link type on a page is to go directly to the source code and see what’s used. The new version of Firefox has a great “View Selection Source” option that allow you to view just the sauce code for a small section of a page. To use it just highlight a link on the browser page, right click, and select “View Selection Source”. What we’re looking for are standard links of the format Good Link.
Links that use JavaScript Bad Link#1 or internal redirects Bad Link#2 should be avoided as they are unlikely to pass PageRank.

• Where would your link be located on the page?
Link placement is thought to be a new factor in Google’s evaluation of link value. The idea is that inks placed in the main content area of a page are more likely to be ‘editorial’ type links, while links placed in the footer are may represent compensated or paid text link type advertisements. One savvy link development strategy which addresses this preference is the idea of content trades or syndication. Instead of directly negotiating for a link on an existing webpage, the link developer instead offers a free article on a topic of interest which includes links to your site in the body of the article text. This is an excellent strategy which we’ll go into more detail on later.


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