Generally when you hear people talk about links, you hear about how much “weight” a link possesses and that sort of stuff, and in theory, if you got a link back from CNN or NYtimes, it is of course going to carry more weight than from a blog from out of nowhere linking back to you. But, in some cases, it may get tricky, and knowing what the difference between a good link from a bad link is a good practice in maintaining your link profile and to help improve your site.
Determining a Link’s Value
A link is just a link right? Well, not all links are particularly the same and carry the same weight. Some links carry more than others, and some may carry far less weight than others. So how do we give more value to our links?
A lot of factors come into play, I’ll list some of the factors that Google uses to evalute how much “weight” a certain site has and etc.
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- Google looks at your backlinks that contribute to your weight, in other words your link profile.
- They look at the amount of outbound links as well as the overall number of links on a certain page.
- PageRank probably has some effect, but really minimal effect proclaimed by SEO gurus.
- Understanding and implanting rel=”nofollow” and when to link out without it. As a side note, even though it has almost no correlation to this topic, Google says they no longer support PageRank sculpting, so, you should remove all your nofollow tags in all your internal pages, except maybe your login page. Anything resourceful for readers, Google wants.
Google looks forward to quality rather than quatity, that was why the reason why Google came up with “how much weight a link has,” and etc. The more value your link structure has, the more powerful and easier, your site is going to rank in the search engines.
Lets Talk About Finding Links
Okay, now that you know how to fundamentally improve your site’s weight with the link backs you have already obtained, how do you spot a bad link when searching for backlinks? Of course, if a site has the opposite of the fundamentals, they are going to carry less weight.
So, lets say, you see a site with a lot of hyperlinked anchor keywords on the bottom of their site’s footer. Does that spark a sign saying that this is a quality website? No, and the more attributes that they oppose, the more strikeouts the site carries – leaving them less weight than other sites who don’t oppose these strikeouts of course.
