Are My Links Valuable?

[SEOneophyte]

I have been link building for a couple months now. I am having a hard time trying to figure out which sites are even worthy of getting links from. Obviously, those that are clearly link farming, or have lots of ads throughout their site are not valuable.  I use OSE, but don't know what is a good P.A or D.A. and what it means when one is much higher than the other (and if that is a bad thing). I also use compete.com to give me a general idea of the unique visitors going into a site. Any tools I can use to help evaluate the strength of specific incoming links/ specific websites? Any ideas or thoughts would be helpful. Thanks So Much, Melissa

[RyanKent]

Hi Melissa.

The value of a link can be interpreted in many ways. First let me offer several great links on this topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-from-a-to-z

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/link-building-management

Some generalities regarding measuring the value of a link:

You naturally want links from the highest DA site possible. It is also important to receive the link from a page on that site that has good PA. If the page is buried or otherwise is not seen, then the link may not even be seen by search engines.

The linking site should ideally be relevant to your site, and the anchor text used to link is very important as well.

Links from sites with higher DA/PA then yours is definitely preferred. Links from sites with lower DA/PA require a lot of quantity to make up for their lower quality.

As you can see, there are a lot of factors involved. There are some SEO people such as Ross Hudgens who almost exclusively focus link building.

If I may make a suggestion. Try focusing on creating the most incredibly interesting / helpful / informative content that the world will WANT to link to. If you can create such content, you wont have to work at link building as people will seek out the content and build the links for you. Users will +1 / Like / tweet about your article and let the world know.

[JoeAmadon]

Good question, Melissa. Unfortunately, there is no tool I know of that evaluates the strength of a specific incoming link beyond an evaluation of the page and domain that OSE gives you.

You're on the right track using OSE and considering Page Authority and Domain Authority, and the general perception of spamminess. Other things to consider when evaluating backlink targets:

How many outbound links are on the page you're targeting? Link juice gets divided (not necessarily equally) among all the outbound links on a page. So other things being equal, a link from a page with 5 outbound links is better than a link from a page with 150 outbound links.

When looking at PA and DA, if PA is less than 10-20% of DA, your getting into a less than ideal scenario. There is a chance that page isn't getting crawled . As to "what is a good PA or DA" it's depends on your niche and competition. Run OSE on competing domains to get an idea of what you're up against.

Anchor text. A "click here" link is not going to help you as much as descriptive anchor text like "super awesome widgets".

Alignment. Links from relevant pages/sites are going to be better for your site than links from general/unrelated pages/sites. This not only helps your SEO, but hopefully you actually get good/qualified traffic through the links.