Summary: Links are more valuable if they….
- Are from a page with a high page rank
- Are from a trusted domain
- Are from an authoritative domain
- Are from a page with few other outbound links
- Are from a page relevant to your site
- Use your key word or phrase as anchor text.
So you know you need to plan and execute a successful linking campaign to secure a better page rank for your website, to build trust in the search engines, to gain better rankings and to drive targeted traffic your way. Your starting point in planning your SEO campaign might be researching which websites could potentially link to yours. But how do you decide what value each link has? Without doubt, some links have a greater value than others.
Page rank
Page rank is a good determination of the value of the link, but it is less important than it used to be. How do you find the page rank? If you’re using Mozilla Firefox, just download the page rank tool which tells you the page rank for every site you visit. If you’re using something else, like Internet Explorer, switch to Firefox, it’s much better.
Don’t get mixed up however – the page rank of the home page is not the page rank of the domain. A good way to estimate the page rank of a domain is to use SEO Moz’s Linkscape. Try here: http://www.seomoz.org/toolbox/pagerank.
Domain trust
It is a widely held belief amongst SEO experts that domain trust is a huge factor in the value of a link (see our article on link relevance, authority and trust). Nobody can know what algorithms search engines use to calculate trust but this without doubt is calculated by reference to their link profile. Essentially, search engines will look at which sites link to your website and whether they are trusted, to calculate whether your site is likely to be trusted.
Authority
Search engines view some sites as more of an authority than others. Again, this isn’t publically available information so there’s no way of knowing which sites are trusted. It’s thought that there is some correlation between authority and page rank, but that it’s not a direct correlation. Authority is a measure of how websites within a market are linked to; page rank looks at the aggregate of links without reference to a particular market place. Consequently, sites regarded as authoritative are likely to have a high page rank, but it’s not always so.
Specific page factors
As stated above, there’s a different between the page rank of a domain and the page rank of an individual page. There’s also a difference between the trust, relevance and authority of a domain, and of its individual pages. It’s perfectly feasible that a domain could be trusted but a particular page on the domain might not be. A generic links page, for example, is unlikely to be viewed as a trusted page.
Other links on the linking page
The quantity of outbound links on the page linking to you is relevant. The page votes with its passable page rank but each link on the page (each vote) consumes a proportion of that page rank, and so the more links, the more diluted the rank that is passed to your site.
It’s a simple formula – the passable page rank divided by the number of outbound links on that particular page.
Relevance
If the site linking to you isn’t relevant to your site, the value of the link is far less (see our article on link relevance, authority and trust). So focus your main efforts on getting links from sites that are relevant to your market. If you use content to gain links (for example, in article directories), ensure that your content is directly relevant to your site and the key word or phrase that you’re targeting. The value will be far greater by following this strategy.
Anchor text
Ensure the anchor text features a key word or phrase that you are targeting, as far as possible.
Enjoyed this article?
Subscribe to our RSS feed, follow us on Twitter or just simply recommend it.
Further Discussion
Leave a Response
Make sure you enter the * required information where indicated. Responses are moderated so please no link dropping, no keywords or domains as names; do not spam, and do not advertise!