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Monday, December 10

Link Value Factors - The Experts Have Their Say

With all the controversy surrounding linking at the moment, it was timely that someone put the link debate into context. Wiep Knol, a manager of Link Marketing from the Netherlands, has paneled 17 SEO and link building experts to draft an important list of Link Quality Factors.

The panel was provided with just under 40 different link characteristics to rate - which they did on various 5 point scales. Some were general link factors, some on-page elements, some on-domain factors and some negative considerations (dampening factors).

The surveying was based on the premise that search engines judge links for traffic (not just PR juice) and opinions rated accordingly. Below are the ratings as the experts voted. For the ful run-down of each experts opinions on each - visit Wiep's blog for a full review (worth the read).

The Link Factors

Anchor Text - the text within a hyperlink
Age of Link
Type of Link - image, text
Surrounding Text - giving link context
Number of Links - one link vs site wide links
Location of Link - as displayed on the page
Reciprocity - is there a link back to the site
Target Page - aimed at homepage or deeper pages
Location of Link in Source Code - how far into the source code is the link

The On Page Factors

Page authority - the number of inbound links
Amount of outbound links
Total links on the page - total number of inbound and outbound links
Page authority - the number of internal links
Relevance of other links
Age of the Page
Page Relevance - the relevance of the page content
Quality of other outbound links
Amount of non linking content on the page
URL of the page - the relevance of keyword in the web address
Page Relevance - the relevance of words out of context
Page Authority - PageRank
Last date of page edit
Page Type - html, aspx, php etc

The On Domain Factors

Domain authority - quality of backlinks to the site
Age of domain
Relevant Authority - rankings on relevant keywords
Domain authority - number of backlinks
Domain Authority - PageRank
Domain Authority - rankings on irrelevant keywords
Domain relevance - the words making up the domain name
TLD - type of domain (eg. ".com", ".edu", ".gov" etc)
Alexa Ranking

The Negative Factors
For the negative factors - head over to Wiep's post

For anyone who ever thought effective link building was easy - think again. The list above highlights the myriad of factors that are at play. More importantly it shows that link building is a highly involved process that won't necessarily generate top results overnight.

Thanks to Wiep for undertaking the survey and bringing focus back to the important factors behind link quality.

2 Comments

At 12:44 PM, Wiep said...: Thanks for the kind words, Rene!

-it's Wiep btw :)
At 12:59 PM, Rene LeMerle said...: you're welcome - they're well deserved.

apologies for the mis-spelling - post has been updated. Must be my dyslexia coming through ;)