Hey! Do you evaluate the quality of your links?

People post comments on blogs and think this is SEO (because they post a link to their website). It’s not. Why? Because 99.99% of these links are nofollow. And in case you don’t know what a nofollow link is here is a short definition: a nofollow link is not pursued by search engines and it doesn’t pass link juice (but retains some of it).

Links that point back to your website are extremely important. This is what makes your website outrank others. Links basically means people that talk about you. Let’s make a short exercise. If you hear the girl that serves coffee talking about stock evolution do you trust what she says? Probably no.

If you pay a photographer to shoot your wedding and he shows up with a common point and shoot camera, do you trust him? Probably no. The conclusion is that it matters who says the words: how trusty is that person.

Now let’s get back to our websites: it’s the same thing. It matters the authority of the websites, the degree of related-subjects, where is the link placed, on what page and what is the actual text of the link.

If we’re talking about top-authority websites then it doesn’t matter if the website has any kind of relevancy to the content on your website. This is the biggest kind of link that you could get.

If we’re talking about normal websites then there are some rules of thumb that you could check to see if it’s really worth the effort to get a link from them:

1. Does your content have any kind of relation to the content posted by the website that will link back to you? Search engines like to see topic related websites linking. The reason is that this way they can assign relevancy points to your content. You say that you target a keyword by placing it in the title and content but search engines can’t evaluate more than that. It needs other websites that already develop some trust to link back to you and tell the search engine that you really “talk” about what you say you talk.
2. What will be the words used for linking. If it’s a word like “here” (used in Read more here…) or other irrelevant word then the quality of the link it’s certainly diminished. The best would be to have the text of the link containing keywords you want to rank for. That is why you should never link to other websites with the keywords you want to rank well for.
3. Where that link would be placed. It’s much more useful for you to have a link from a particular page (placed naturally in context) that talks about a related topic rather than a footer link. A footer link caries low value because it’s not placed in a context: that is why search engines can’t assign any kind of relevancy between your page and the keywords you target (because the point from where you received the link isn’t descriptive enough)

What not to do:

1. Submit your website to web directories that accept all websites with no restriction
2. Submit your website to farm links
3. Build dozens of websites and cross link it (NOTE: if you have a decent number of websites and if there is a relation of topics between them it’s ok to cross link)

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