5 Factors that determine the Quality of a Good Back-Link

Are you getting Good-Quality Backlinks? Understand the Factors that determine the quality of a Link

Good and large amount of Back-links are the most important criterion for getting High Rankings in Search Engines. So, every Blogger aims at getting quality backlinks to his/her blog. But what does everyone exactly mean when they say “Quality Backlink”? I am going to explain the five most important factors that determine the Quality of any link!

The Relation Attribute

You may have seen the source code in which the syntax used for links is like :

<a href=”any URL” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor text</a>

Just consider the rel=”nofollow” part. This means that the link will not be crawled by Search engines like Google. So, you wont get any advantage if the nofollow attribute is attached to any Anchor Tag containing your link. Even though Google wont consider No-follow links, Yahoo Search engine still considers the number of No-Follow links for allotting Search Engine rankings.

But if the source code of the link mentions rel=”external” , then the link is supposed to be good for SEO. Also, the links without the rel attribute are good for SEO. Such links are known as Do-Follow links.

Anchor Text

Consider this link syntax:

The Text inside the Anchor tags, in this case “Some Text Here” is known as the anchor text. This is the Hyper-linked Text. When you will click on this text , it will take you to the Destination Page.

Usage of keywords related to the Destination link must be used. It will help the Destination page get good Search engine rankings for the Anchor text Keywords. Using keywords for which you want that page to rank higher must be used. Usage of irrelevant keywords must be avoided as it reduces the quality of the link. For example: If you use Anchor Text as “this link” then it wont carry a good weight in Search engines.

Location of the Link

The location of the links is also an important factor in deciding the quality of the Link. The higher the link appears in a Page the more is its Value in terms of Search Engines. But, normally links placed in the main Reading section of the Web-Page carry more importance. The links placed in the sidebar and the Footer including the Credit links do not carry equivalent weight.

But the maximum priority is allotted to the links placed in the Header section of a Page. If you get a link from the Header of any Website then it will surely improve your rank to a great extent if the Website is not Spam.

The Domain Name

The Domain name which links to a website is also very important. The amount of weight each domain name carries depends on various factors like:

The PageRank of the Domain
The Suffix of the domain name (eg: .COM, .ORG, .EDU)
The Authority of the Domain

The higher the pagerank of the domain where the Link arises from, the more weight it carries. If you get a link form a Pagerank 7 Domain name then it is far more better than getting a link from PageRank 3 Domain name.

The suffix of the Domain name also does matter. The Government and the Educational TLDs have far more importance than other TLDs. This means then if you get a link from a PR 5 .EDU website then it will carry more importance than PR 5 .COM website.

Google gives authority of the Domain based on various factors like the Domain age, the Domain registration period and the Quality of content on the Domain. The authority depends on how many sites link to that domain and how many of them are spam. Also, the authority of a domain decreases if it links to Spam sites. So, if you get Do-Follow links from High Authority domains like TechCrunch.com or Wikipedia.com, then you will surely find your website in the Top Links in Google.

Number of Outgoing Links

For understanding this concept, let me give you a small example. There are 100 out-going links from a webpage and your link is one among them. So, the approximate authority that will be transferred to your website is one hundredth time of its authority, which is really very less.

Now consider that a webpage which contains only 10 links and your link is one among them. Now you will get one-tenth times the authority of that webpage, which is supposed to be a very good ratio.

Note: I know you guys will have a lot more tips regarding this topic to share and I have missed out on a lot of points. I have mentioned only some important Factors here. Please let us know about unique SEO tips that you know or follow.

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Filed Under: SEO

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Comments (24)

qwertyweb

October 2nd, 2009 at 10:48 am

i totally follow up with do follow RELATION blogs as they get huge traffic and many comments too and even commentator gets better SEO

Jessica Guerro

October 2nd, 2009 at 11:02 am

Wow thats was a great article on back links and how to make sure you are getting good, quality ones. I appreciate you sharing this useful information. Thanks very much.

crazy blogger

October 2nd, 2009 at 5:00 pm

What are ways to get backlinks?

Rohit Sane

October 2nd, 2009 at 5:38 pm

@Crazy Blogger: Commenting on other websites or writing guest articles for other blogs. You can also write good content on your own blog which will impress other bloggers to give you a link from their blog.

Agent 001

October 2nd, 2009 at 6:28 pm

Its good to see you have pointed out the location of link point. The best way to understand this you need to understand how search bots read your webpage. They start at the top and go towards bottom codewise.

In most themes codewise header comes first, then navigation, then post, then comment, then sidebar and atlast footer. So best location will be header/navigation. But it is not possible to get a link there. So you should try to get links from post and than comment.

Rohit Sane

October 2nd, 2009 at 9:08 pm

You are on the point Agent 001. We need to understand how search bot work and crawl and index our website!

Devilslab- Technology news and latest tricks

October 3rd, 2009 at 3:15 pm

i never used suitable anchor text.. actually i dont know the importance of anchor text… but right now i got to know about that… will work on this… thanks

S.Pradeep Kumar

October 3rd, 2009 at 8:25 pm

I usually check the attribute thing in blogs before I guest write there … good habit !

Ricky

October 4th, 2009 at 10:05 am

I check the link using my FF plugin. But as per video of Google expert there is equal important to “nofollow” link as well.

mostlyBlog

October 4th, 2009 at 1:02 pm

hey Rohit good post, thanks to sharing with us

Rohit Sane

October 5th, 2009 at 8:10 pm

@Ricky: No-Follow attributes have resulted in the Page-Rank sculpting algorithm which was created in recent times. It doesn’t have any importance but it surely reduces the importance of Do-Follow links.

Chethan

October 6th, 2009 at 4:24 pm

This Post Is Too Informative! Thanks!

SEO Manchester

October 7th, 2009 at 5:56 am

When using anchor text with contextual links into your own website it is beneficial to get backlinks from pages which are related to your industry. Google knows which industry your site is aimed at by title tags, keywords in domain name, in-links anchor text and so on.

In essence what I am getting to is that it is more benefical to get decent quality backlinks from industry related sites before links from any old neighborhood.

A link from a PR0 site which holds related content to your field is better to have than a PR2 site which is off topic completely.

But lets not get silly here, Google still loves the PageRank system and if you are getting PR3-4 unrelated links they’ll end up being more powerful than a related PR0 site.

Search engines crawl all content and if they see that keyword related content and keywords appear on the page along with the anchor text link then they are deemed even more valuable.

Worth bearing in mind-when backlink building.

Extreme John

October 7th, 2009 at 8:20 am

I really don’t pay much attention to it kind of just let things flow, I bet if I focused more attention on it using some of the information above I would probably see some nice growth and an increase in quality.

Rohit Sane

October 7th, 2009 at 5:45 pm

@SEO Manchester: Its good that you have shared these valuable info with us here. It will surely help us do better in SEO of our Blogs and Websites.

@John: Good that you find this article helpful for your Growth. Wishing you luck!

lawmacs web design

October 11th, 2009 at 2:27 am

Thanks for this informative post i do agree with the fact that getting links from site with PR0 within the similar industry than getting links from a PR4 site from a different industry however and this is just my opinion i still believe that a link from a high ranking site still brings some credibility this is just my opinion

Stefan

October 11th, 2009 at 2:32 am

I skimmed through the comments but couldn’t see anyone mention the title-tag which you always should be using when getting a link back to your site.

a href=”#” title=”anchor text”

More info about it at W3.

Rohit Sane

October 11th, 2009 at 1:01 pm

@lawmacs web design: You are very correct at this. Even I consider having a high PageRank link as more valuable than PR0 link from the site in the same Niche.

@Stefan: You are on the point! Thanks for bringing it to notice. I really missed out on this.

Amit Banerjee

October 11th, 2009 at 10:15 pm

Good points Rohit. Would like to add one though

Links become more powerful when the content is relevant.Imagine you have a technology blog and win a backlink from a reputed Blog on blogging tips.That will increase your authority by a bit but if you win a backlink from a tech blog then it will be beneficial in the longer run.Because the link will be more relevant.

Rohit Sane

October 12th, 2009 at 3:45 pm

@Amit: Thanks Amit! I really missed telling about that.

RAHUL

October 23rd, 2009 at 5:20 pm