How Valuable Your Links Are?

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Paid Links

SEO is all about pushing the limit and adapting how Google’s algorithm works. However, this effort can give us a small glimpse into how links can truly be evaluated and how much ranking power each link yields.

Those of you in the Internet marketing industry might have heard time and again that you need to create great content and earn great links if you want to rank your site or those of your clients. In today’s post, we are going to look at how you can dive deeper to determine the actual value of a potential link to your site, using a method common to private blog network (PBN) domain buyers. Pay closer attention to these six pointers:

1. TRUST FLOW AND CITATION FLOW

Trust flow is a measure of the trustworthiness of a website and citation flow looks at the potential for a site to be influential based upon how many sites link to it. Starting with this check is a good way to quickly identify spam sites as they often have a high citation flow with a disproportionately low trust flow.

2. REVIEWING THE ANCHOR-TEXT RATIOS

The next thing you should look at is the anchor text overview of a potential inbound link. Site which anchors mostly using brand name or the URL, which is what you want to see. On the other hand, sites with anchor texts like: buy cheap NFL jerseys, buy Viagra online or high percentages of commercial anchor texts are sites you want to avoid.

3. TOPICAL TRUST FLOW

Links coming from related sites are more powerful than links with the same metrics coming from unrelated websites. Topical trust flow is a quick way to understand what Google likely thinks a site is about based upon its inbound links. If your site is about plumbing, try to get a great topically relevant link.

4. REFERRING DOMAINS AND BACKLINKS

A lot of people stop after completing the above checks but that is a mistake. In order to better understand the real value of a link, we need to see where the links are coming from that have powered up these metrics. In order to do this we need to look at two things: referring domains and backlinks.

If on the other hand we open the page linking to our site and find it is a links page with 25 outbound links, we need to divide the trust flow of 25 by 25, giving us the power of 1, much less influential than when we have the only link. You should look through the top incoming links of the site you are attempting to gain a link from and use the aforementioned method to see how much power is actually flowing to the site. Using this method you will see that in many cases links coming from less trusted sites with fewer outbound links can actually be more powerful than a resource page link on a more trusted site.

5. REFERRING DOMAINS

Aside from looking at the backlinks on an individual basis you also need to look at the number of referring domains to a site. If you spend several hours writing and pitching a post to a high metric site with only one strong referring domain, you are wasting your time because if they lose one link, the SEO power of their site is dramatically reduced. For this reason you should look for sites with several referring domains that are of high quality. If you are going to invest heavily into earning a link on a site like this, you may even look closer at each of the sites linking to their site before getting started.

6. CHECKING THE ARCHIVE

When buying an expired domain it is common practice to check the site’s history in archive.org. On large and popular sites, this step isn’t necessary. However, if you are doing outreach to smaller bloggers, you may want to do a quick check to make sure they haven’t unknowingly bought a domain with a dark past.

One last step that can help you evaluate the strength of a link or domain is to check the domain authority of the site.