Every blogger knows that links are important, but, the quality of a link varies enormously. These are some of the factors that determine the quality of the link to your site.
Number of links on a page.
If your link is the only one on the page, it will have much more weight, than if it is one link out of 100. In the initial creation of Google’s page rank. The strength of a link was determined by a random walk model. If you goto a page, how much chance is there that the visitor will click on the link to your site. Clearly if there are only a few links, there is a higher chance people will click so Google give it a higher weighting.
For example, Blog Carnivals are a good way to get links, but, the quality is invariably reduced because there can be upto 100 links on the blog post.
A link on a sidebar is good. But, if there are 100s of links on the sidebar, its weighting is reduced.
Relevance of Link.
This is very important. Why would a blog on cycling link to a site on life insurance. If you have a blog on life insurance, you need to get links from finance sites, preferably sites about life insurance. If you have a link to life insurance on a blog about poetry, there is a higher chance google might suspect it is a paid link.
Duplicate Content.
Sometimes I see other blogs copying my content and giving a link back to my site. This splog is of little benefit. Sites with duplicate content are not given high weighting by Google, so their links will be less important.
What is Purpose of Site?
If the site’s purpose is to give links to other sites, I feel this reduces the quality of the link. For example, anyone can write an article on an ezine and get a link back to their site. Because everyone can do it and because ezines link to so many sites, I feel that the quality of the link is reduced. It is the same with blog directories and link directories. Their main purpose is to give links, nobody actually reads these sites because they have no interest. Therefore, the power of a link is reduced.
If the site offers high quality articles and doesn’t link out to all and sundry the power of the link is worth more.
Page Rank of Site.
Page rank can often be given too much importance. But, a link from a PR6 site is ceteris paribus worth much more than a link from a PR2 site. Also check the PR of a page. Also this doesn’t mean it is advisable to buy links from PR6 and PR7 sites. There are many examples of sites who have had their page rank reduced because they sell links.
Is the Link Bought?
The problem with buying links is that it means the site is willing to sell them. If a site is selling links, you will get spammy sites buying them. If you are lucky you may get away with it (especially if it is a relevant niche). But, buying links could damage your site. At best they will have no effect, at worst Google could quietly give your site a bad reputation
Natural Links
These are the links difficult to fake, impossible to buy and given without asking. They occur because other bloggers like your site so much they want to link because your page is useful / interesting. These are the links that appear in the middle of the text. The page rank doesn’t matter that much nor does the anchor text. The important thing is that they will count for a lot because they haven’t been faked.
Nofollow?
If the link is given the ref-”nofollow” it counts for nothing. – unless it brings traffic, but, nofollow means it is ignored by Google algorithm
Traffic.
If a link sends actual traffic, this is a good sign. Firstly traffic is always welcome. But, if the page gets traffic it is likely to be ranked highly by google or at least social bookmarking sites. If you buy a link from a PR7 directory, that link will almost never send traffic, because nobody wastes their time reading blog directories where you can buy links.
Overall
The more difficult it is to get a link, the more useful it generally is. If the link can easily be got by simply submitting to blog directory, blog carnivals or article directory it means everyone else can do it. But, getting a high quality link in the middle of a blog post is not easy and so counts for more.
If you are a new blogger, you should get the ‘easy links’ I do advise submitting some articles to article ezines. I do advise submitting to blog carnivals. But, this shouldn’t be your only strategy. Soon, I will look for practical ways to get those elusive high quality links.
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[...] is hard to fool Google with artificial links. In this article – quality of links, I mentioned how ‘easy to get links’ are generally not very valuable. The really [...]
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