Measurement of Link Value
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Over the past few months I have encountered webmasters who claim to be using instruments far better than open site explorer but they will not disclose what they are. Are there better ways of determining the value of a link than OSE? Is "link juice" more important than page/domain authority where the link resides? Or vice-vesa. Any help understanding this would be appreciated. I do not want to offend other webmasters but I also do not want to be fooled by them either while negotiating a link exchange with them
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thanks very much Ryan - Brett
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Arguably the best tool presently available for checking links is Yahoo site explorer. OSE is very good and there are several other tools as well. There is not any tool I am aware of which is "far better" then OSE. At best, a different tool may be superior in one aspect of analysis. If anyone has a differing opinion I would love to hear it!
With respect to link value, there are numerous considerations:
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What is the DA of the site
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What is the PA / PR of the page?
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How many links are on the page?
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Where is your link on the page? Is it in content or in a footer?
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What anchor text is used? Do you have solid anchor text such as "great website design"? Or is it a simple url link?
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How likely is it that more links will be added to the page?
There are other considerations as well but the above are the top ones. Mik's suggestion of checking the cache refresh is excellent. It offers a view into the importance / PR of the page. There are so many other possible considerations such as if Google determines the link is paid, they will devalue the link. If the linking site is on the same C-block as your site, the link would also be devalued.
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thanks very much Mik. Any thoughts on the issue of link juice which is often brought up by webmasters that I deal with?
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Brett,
The authority sites are visited several times a day but for the most part I would not see a problem with a site that gets a visit weekly but if it is more than a month I would put less value on that link if that is the only valuation metric I am looking at.
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Is there some threshold that is relevant such as every few days? less than a week? thanks
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A good metric to check is how recent the cached version is. The higher frequency of the bot visits is a good indicator of value. Hope this helps
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