6 Tips to Track the Quality of Your Link Partners

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Nowadays finding potential link partners has become one of the toughest jobs to perform. By mentioning link partners I don’t necessarily mean link exchange partners only. Link partners can be anything from a blog you are looking to guest post on or a website you are looking to get links from. It is very important to find out the quality of a site before you waste your valuable time building link partners with less important sites. Here a few things that will help you determine the quality of a site before you jump into getting links from them.

1. Check the crawl frequency

A site that is quality in the eyes of search engines gets crawled more frequently by them so if you have to determine the quality of a page you can check when it was last crawled by the search engines. Check the cache of the page in the search engines to see if it has been crawled in recent times. If the page from the site has not been crawled in months that is certainly not the best page to get links from.

2. Check the site for unique, fresh content

Search engines value sites more that have unique and fresh content. It’s always good to have links from sites that have unique content and are regularly updated. The uniqueness and freshness of the content holds a very high importance within the ranking signals these days. This is why blogs have become so successful today and dominate many of the search engine results pages.

Try to avoid link partners that fill their sites with copied and syndicated content or the ones that have not presented any fresh content for a long time. Links from these type of sites would not add much value.

3. Track the number and quality of incoming links

One of the best ways to determine the quality of a site is to check the number of incoming links to it. While finding the quality of a page, always check the number of backlinks to the main site and also to that particular page where your links will be placed. Examine the type of incoming links the site has, whether they have a variety of links or only a single kind of links. If the site has links from only blogs or only forums or just from directories then they lack somewhere in the quality, because every good site has all kinds of links from blogs, forums, directories and other authority sites.

It’s not only about the number of links but also the quality of those links. It is very important to examine the quality of those links. If the incoming links are coming from non-relevant and spammy sites then having hundreds of links is of no use. It is very important to track the number and also the quality of links that your link partners have.

TIP: While checking the number of incoming links for a page always use multiple tools, because the number of backlinks may vary from one tool to another. You can check the backlinks by using Yahoo Site Explorer, Open Site Explorer, Majestic SEO or any other tool of your choice.

4. Track the Quality of the outgoing links

The quality of a page is also determined by the type of sites it links to. Sites linking to suspicious, spammy, non relevant sites and link farms/networks will not be able to pass you any link juice as the sites that link to these type of sites generally get devalued by the search engines. So always check what type of sites and pages are generally linked by link partners where your links are going to be placed.

If the site links to any of the mentioned above always try to avoid having links from these sites. It even can be worse for you if you link back to the site that is involved in linking to these spammy sites.

5. Check the MozRank of the site

SEOmoz has developed a wonderful algorithm for determining a site’s authority and the quality of its pages. The tool has been provided here. To determine the quality of a page or a site check its MozRank, Page Authority and MozTrust (you need to be a pro member at SEOmoz to use MozTrust and some other features). The sites having higher scores on all these the serves better quality links.

6. Check Google’s PageRank for the site

There is a reason I have mentioned the PageRank last. The PR has always been overrated. Many of us think that a page or site having a higher PR is generally good. But actually, it is one of the least important ranking signals that search engines use to determine the quality of a webpage. However, you can still use it as one of the factors for determining the quality of a page. Generally most quality web pages have a decent PR but it should be noted that every high PR page is not necessarily a good one. The relevancy of a page and the above mentioned factors should be taken into consideration while evaluating the quality. PR should always be taken as an indication but not as a compulsion.

CONCLUSION

It is impossible to determine what pages are considered the most quality link partners in the eyes of the search engines but the factors mentioned above do give a very close idea as to how much quality a website serves. So don’t run after every link you can get. If you are spending your valuable time and efforts in building links make sure that you’re getting the right link partners.