How Do You Determine If A Link Is Quality?
-
What tools and signals do you use to determine if a link is quality or not?
How can you tell if a link is going to hurt your ranking?
-
Hi Anchorwave,
You can check out a post published earlier this year by SEER Interactive. It's my favorite article of all time in helping me determine whether a link is quality or not. Feel free to check out the 25 ways to qualify a link.
Cheers!
-
I just wanted to add to what Brendan said, I would start by searching in Google by using keywords you want to rank for and then keep searching, using keywords that are thematically relevant to your site.
Using the SEOQuake (see below for optimal settings) and SEOMoz toolbar in the Google SERP will give you an indication of whether or not you even want to view the site (If PageRank is 4, DA is >50, etc, etc.). Go 100 results deep, the first two pages will likely be competitors that wouldn't link to you anyway.
Again, like Brendan said, if the site is ranking for a relevant keyword then it's safe to assume Google views that page/site favorably!
Once you have looked at the site and made sure there aren't any irrelevant (or paid) links on the site and it passes your metrics be sure to check the inbound links to the site and the page if it's an inside page.
It will depend on your industry but generally I won't look at an inside page if ti has less than 10 links to it. I've seen too many PR4s lose page rank in the next update because it was only getting juice internally, so the inbound links must be from external sources.
I also question the tlds of the inbound links. I will usually 'head for the hills' if I see .ru, .cn, .id, etc you know the drill.
Hope that helps.
**For SEOQuake, when I use it turned on in the SERP I have it show Google PR, Indexed Pages, and I used to show the Yahoo Link and Link Domain counts
Make sure you have it set for 'parameters by request' otherwise you'll timeout in Google in no time.
-
Hi,
Make sure you've got the SEOmoz toolbar installed in your browser. This will give you a decent idea of page and domain authority and trust.
Is the topic of the page and other links on the page relevant to your site? Are there links for all sorts of sites and industries on there with no clear focus? That's a sign of site which is selling links.
Put the URL of the page in to Google and make sure it ranks first. If not, steer well clear. Also take a few title tags from random pages on the site and google those too to make sure they're ranking and haven't received a penalty.
There are many more factors but I hope those will get you started.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Regular links may still
Good day: I understand guest articles are a good way to pass linkjuice and some authors have a link to their website on the "Author Bio" section of the article. These links are usually regular links. However, I noticed that some of these sites (using wordpress) have several SEO plugins with the following settings: Nofollow: Tell search engines not to spider links on this webpage. My question is: If the setting above was activated, I would assume the author's website link would look like a regular link but some other code could still be present in the page (ex, header) that would prevent this regular link from being followed. Therefore, the guest writer would not experience any linkjuice. Any idea if there's a way of being able to see if this scenario is happening? What code would we look for?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Audreythenurse0 -
Determining if our ranking is due to increased competition
Hello, I'd like to give you a list of DA/PA and see if the slipping of our rank is due to competition. This if for our main keyword. Below is the top ten sites in our industry - their DA and PA for this head term. This is for the plural form of the keyword - a product term. If I don't say differently the following are where the title has the keyword in it exactly and also these are ecommerce site listings. Does this look like we are being outdone by competition or would you say that there might be some other cause: 1. DA 85, PA 38 2. DA 34 PA 34 (These guys are mostly paid links by the way) 3. DA 100 PA 55 (singular form of keyword and also informational site) 4. DA 91 PA 41 5. DA 23 PA 24 (The only thing I see about this one is that their backlink profile is very white hat and they have the nicest looking site in our niche) 6. DA 29 PA 31 (exact match domain) 7. DA 99 PA 1 8. DA 22 PA 34 (Guide including infographics - doesn't sell products themselves) 9. DA 96 PA 1 10 DA 26 PA 38 -- This is us with 57 total root domains sitewide and 43 root domains to the home page. Let me know what additional information you need.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
Potential spam issue - back links
Hi - we have a client whom we work with for SEO. During a review we noticed in Webmaster Tools, there was an IP address with over 30,000 links to our clients site. The IP address is 92.60.0.123. From looking up the IP address details, it looks like it is based in Europe - but we are unable to establish what it is, where the links are and who created it. We are concerned it could be a potential spammer trying to cause an issue with the SEO campaign. Is there any way of finding out any more details apart from the basic information about the location of the IP address? Also - if we submit a disavow via webmaster tools, we are unsure what issue it will have on the clients site if we do not know what it is and the type of links it is creating. Any ideas? Thanks for your help! Phil.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Globalgraphics0 -
Black Hat SEO Case Study - Private Link Network - How is this still working?
I have been studying my competitor's link building strategies and one guy (affiliate) in particular really caught my attention. He has been using a strategy that has been working really well for the past six months or so. How well? He owns about 80% of search results for highly competitive keywords, in multiple industries, that add up to about 200,000 searches per month in total. As far as I can tell it's a private link network. Using Ahref and Open Site Explorer, I found out that he owns 1000s of bought domains, all linking to his sites. Recently, all he's been doing is essentially buying high pr domains, redesigning the site and adding new content to rank for his keywords. I reported his link-wheel scheme to Google and posted a message on the webmaster forum - no luck there. So I'm wondering how is he getting away with this? Isn't Google's algorithm sophisticated enough to catch something as obvious as this? Everyone preaches about White Hat SEO, but how can honest marketers/SEOs compete with guys like him? Any thoughts would be very helpful. I can include some of the reports I've gathered if anyone is interested to study this further. thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | howardd0 -
Cutting off the bad link juice
Hello, I have noticed that there is plenty of old low quality links linking to many of the landing pages. I would like to cut them off and start again. Would it be ok to do the following?: 1. create new URLs (domain is quite string and new pages are ranking good and better than the affected old landing pages) and add the old content there 2. 302 redirect old landing pages to the new ones 3. put "no index" tag on the old URLs (maybe even "no index no follow"?)or it wouldn't work? Thanks in advance
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ThinkingJuice0 -
External links without unnatural without my control
What should I do with links that Google considers link unnatural, but I have no control over them?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | soulmktpro0 -
Retail Site and Internal Linking Best Practices
I am in the process of recreating my company's website and, in addition to the normal retail pages, we are adding a "learn" section with user manuals, reviews, manufacturer info, etc. etc. It's going to be a lot of content and there will be linking to these "learn" pages from both products and other "learn" pages. I read on a SEOmoz blog post that too much internal linking with optimized anchor text can trigger down-rankings from Google as a penalty. Well, we're talking about having 6-8 links to "learn" pages from product pages and interlinking many times within the "learn" pages like Wikipedia does. And I figured they would all have optimized text because I think that is usually best for the end user (I personally like to know that I am clicking on "A Review of the Samsung XRK1234" rather than just "A Review of Televisions"). What is best practice for this? Is there a suggested limit to the number of links or how many of them should have optimized text for a retail site with thousands of products? Any help is greatly appreciated!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Marketing.SCG0 -
If a site is punished by google like -30, or -60, are the link from that site efficient?
Like this way, if I build a blog and in some situation, the blog is punished by google as some reason I don't know, all the rank dropped and got the -30 punishment. If I put a outbound link on the sidebar, or footer position. what it'll be for that link? A is punished, a link is put on the A website and link to B website what that link means to B punished got many ways Thank you
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | yifang01230