Summary: You need links to your site as part of your strategy to rank well in Google, but not all links are worth the same. A number of factors affect the value of a link.
Your SEO strategy should include obtaining links from other sites. Very simply, this can count as ‘votes’ for your site in Google’s eyes and they tell Google something about your content. But not all links are worth the same. What factors influence what a link is worth to you? Whilst almost all links to your site are going to have a little bit of value, knowing which factors make a more valuable link will help you focus on obtaining links from sites that will have the greatest benefit for your site.
Most important: Trust
Google trusts some links more than others. There’s no definitive way of figuring out which are trusted domains, although you could probably stab a guess at which in your industry are likely to be trusted – i.e. the big hubs and main news sites that people in your industry go to. The trust of any domain is calculated by search engines based on calculations made by analysing trusted seed sets. A link from a trusted domain is worth far more than a link from a domain that has no trust.
Very important: Authority/Importance of domain
Google considers some sites to be more authoritative than others. As for trusted domains, there’s no hard and fast way of knowing if a site is considered to be authoritative although you can probably identify some that are likely to be, from industry knowledge. See our article ‘How do I know if I have an authoritative domain‘.
Very important: Keywords in anchor text
Getting a link with your keyword in is much more value than getting a link with your site address or site name. For example:
<a href="http://www.angelseo.co.uk">SEO</a>
…is going to be far more valuable than:
<a href="http://www.angelseo.co.uk">www.angelseo.co.uk</a>
The first link example tells Google that our site is about SEO and is relevant to the search term ‘SEO’ so helps us rank better for that term. For more info, see our article ‘the value of anchor text in links‘.
Important: PageRank
Every page can pass on link juice to the pages it links to. Each page on the internet has a passable PageRank, the maximum amount it can pass to the sites it links to. Every time it links to another page, that figure is divided a little bit more. So for example, let’s say hypothetically the passable PageRank of a page was 6. If that page links to three pages, it’s only passing a value of 2 to each. The amount of PageRank (link juice) that is passed by a particular link is important. Some SEO experts attribute it more importance than anything else but nowadays, it’s a combination of things that give value to links. Still, PageRank, taken with relevance, authority, trust and anchor text, makes up one of the most important factors.
For a basic overview of PageRank, see our article ‘How does PageRank work?‘.
Relevant: Link is in the content
The position of the link on the page linking to your site is important – a link positioned in the content is more valuable than a link positioned in sidebars and footers and so on. This is probably down to two things. First, often the links in sidebars and footers are found on every page and Google can therefore see that they are a general link, not specific to a particular piece of content. Secondly, Google will look at the content around the link for relevance and if the link is contained in a sidebar or footer, there likely won’t be any.
Relevant: Link is not with many other links
SEO experts tend to agree that the position of the link on the page in relation to other links is relevant. If your link is in a long list of links, it’s less valuable than being positioned in content. So similar to the above point, but the point is here that the link isn’t surrounded by a lot of other links.
Some bearing: Other links on the page
It’s thought that the quality of the other links on the page is relevant for the value of your link, although this has less bearing than other factors. Still, it’s likely that Google will give more value to a page containing a small selection of quality links, than a large collection of random and sometimes spammy links. The latter suggests the links may be paid, which Google does not allow. Further, a good quality select collection of resources is more likely to receive inlinks itself so will be more trusted than a huge collection of less valuable links that nobody is likely to link to.
You may also like our articles on ‘how valuable is a link for SEO‘ and ‘link relevance, authority and trust‘.
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