Not all sites and the links you may obtain from them are equally important. Some links are free, some charge a one-time listing fee while others charge monthly or annually. Especially for the sites that charge money, here are some criteria you can use to help make the decision whether to pursue a link:
1. Make sure the site allows you to use the exact anchor text you want for your link so that it can contain your most important keywords.
2. Make sure the link use a simple HREF code format. Javascript-based links or links that redirect to another page are worthless. Also, links that display funny tracking characters in the URL are worthless. Do a View Source on the page your link will be placed on and check for the following:
1. That no redirection is used on the link (won’t pass PageRank).
2. That Javascript isn’t used to code the link (Google won’t see the link).
3. That the rel=NOFOLLOW attribute is not used (Google won’t follow the link).
4. That the META robots tag for the page doesn’t contain “NOINDEX” (page won’t be indexed).
3. Use the tool at http:/www.marketleap.com to determine how many backlinks (incoming links) the site has. This is an important indicator for how important Google deems a link will be. A link from a page with many inbound links can be as important as the PR value of that page.
4. Check the PageRank of the actual page your link will be listed on – not the PageRank of the home page, which can be vastly different.
5. The Alexa Traffic rating of the site. This provides a rough indication of the traffic the sites receives. Lower numbers are better. Note that the Alexa rating can be manipulated so take this with a grain of salt. It is better than nothing however.
6. Is the linking page in the index of Google? A link from any page not indexed by Google is worthless. Copy and paste a section of unique text from the page in the search box of Google and see if the page appears for the search.
7. Are links displayed in the cached version of the page? If not, the page probably uses some trick to keep search engines from seeing outgoing links.
8. Content on the page your link will be placed on as well as the anchor text of other links on the page. Are all the links in the same general category or does the page contain tons of links in every conceivable category and lots of spammy ads?
“That no redirection is used on the link (won’t pass PageRank).”
Not totally correct. The redirection that won’t pass PR is the one that uses some form of “redir.php?…”, which is BLOCKED in robots.txt (if it isn’t blocked (and it ISN’T by default) – the redirection passes PR).
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Great post, i completely agreed with what all you have narrated through this post.These are all awesome tips, thanks for sharing this with us here. Great find!
Anchor text within links do not pass value any more, at least not like it used too. Words by Matt Cutts.
Yeah, no follow links will do no good for your site if you are up for back links. Thanks for sharing this post! Cheers!
@Webdesign Miami – because you believe what Matt Cutt’s Says??!!??
I think that a website’s link popularity should “look natural”. In that case I will focus on Dofollow links of course but I will purposely also get a few Nofollow links here and there, as long as the website’s quality is OK (good design, interesting related topic) – please see article on Nofollow here – http://www.seo-muscle.com/why-nofollow-links-can-be-good/
thanks for the marketleap website link….time to do a little reseach!
cheers
Well PR isn’t that big of a deal. You should be more concerned on generating traffic. But nonetheless thanks for the article.
I know this might sound a little mad, but when link building don’t go for sites who’s page rank is much higher than yours as it generally appears to be a spammy link… picked this point up this point from the recent A4U expo in london… anyone got any comments on this?