What Makes a Quality Link?

When it comes to link building, there's more to it than just getting any old website or webmaster to link to you. Many of our customers will come to us asking our opinion on offers they've been made to take part in link farms and other scams and they don't understand why those scams don't work, or how they can go about getting good links for their websites. Building links is an important part of your SEO, but a few good links can go a lot farther to helping you rank in search engines than multiple poor links can (which is what many link building scams are offering). So how can you tell the difference between a good link and a "bad" or low quality one? Here are a few characteristics of good quality links which can help your SEO:

1. Link from reputable websites with high authority. Links from websites that are already ranking well, have been around for a long time and have lots of backlinks themselves are much better for your SEO than links from average, poorly ranked or new websites. The reason for that is the search engines like Google view links from these websites as more reputable. A link to your website is like a "vote" the more votes you get and the better the people that vote for you, the better you look to search engines.
2. Links with good anchor text. It's not just about getting the link in the fist place. The anchor text on the link (the clickable text you see in the hyperlink) tells search engines what the page that it links to is about. If your hyperlink has good quality text that matches your keywords and appropriately describes you page, it helps search engines clarify what your page is about and helps your rankings.
3. One way links vs. reciprocal links.Getting a one-way link (meaning someone links to you without you linking to them) is good (as long as the suit the characteristics we've mentioned above) however, reciprocal links (ones where you exchange links with another website) aren't seen as good practice. Search engines view reciprocal links as an attempt to manipulate their search engine algorithms and so they don't carry much weight with search engines as one-way links do.
4. Links without "nofollow" tags. The "nofollow" tag basically tells search engines that just because the hyperlink exists doesn't mean that it should affect the target page's search engine ranking. In other words it reduces the benefits of having a website one-way hyperlink to you in the first place.

Posted by Amberlie Denny at January 27, 2011 8:00 AM

Comments

Howard

Hi

interesting article ... how does one determine wether a link that is listed as pointing to your site, has a no follow tag on it ?