Checklist to Measuring Inbound Link Quality
When you are conducting search engine ranking position reviews has anyone face such a problem, where your competitors are ranking higher with lesser backlinks even though your website is almost similar in size, structure, keywords and Pagerank? If this is you, don’t worry you aren’t alone. Many of us are facing this within our niche. If you are wondering why, we can’t absolutely pin point the cause, but we could try to intelligently turn the tables into our favor.
As a start, I would conduct a SEO review of your competitors and your own site to ensure that you have done all you could for the on page optimization before heading out to off page. But for the purpose of this topic, I would like to assume that all else are equal and only the quality of inbound links to both your competition and your sites are the deciding factor for higher search rankings.
So you will ask how can ensure that the quality of my inbound links are really of quality and they aren’t discounted from providing link juice. The straight answer is you cant sure, but you can use the following checklist to help you determine if the site does add value to link juice.
1 – Check if the site is indexed in Google, no point getting links from a banned site
2 – If the site is indexed, check when the last date of index occurred, the more recent the index it means it does have some value
3 – Does the page have a lot of outbound links, if it has a lot of links you might want to reconsider dropping your link on the page?
4 – Where does the outbound links go to, are the sites considered as good neighborhoods or bad neighborhoods? Again if its linking out to bad sites you might want to move on.
5 – Is the content on the page relevant or complementary to your page? No point getting a link on a page that is totally way out from your site’s topic as it doesn’t help much for SEO or attracting users to click on the link as well
6 – In the past, I would normally advise marketers to pay attention to the PR of the page. But its no hidden secret Google wants to remove PR, so focusing on PR should only be a nice to have instead of a deciding factor for dropping your links on the page.
This is my checklist that I use when I conduct link building, do you have others to add into the mix? Feel free to drop a note below or email us.