10 Quick Link Building Factors

In my post: Top 10 Tools To Improve Affiliate Productivity I mentioned that I use SEO Spyglass to find useful links for my clients and to establish the link landscape for their competitors (you can dig up some hilarious stuff!). But, I usually take things a bit further and get the TrustRank from SEOMoz to build a more holistic view.

I must admit there's just so much garbage spoken about link-building, its unreal. Some people like to say they're experts when they've on ever read a handful of blog posts and hardly researched the impact of any campaign they've implemented. For me the impact of any link-building should be assessed after a week, month, six months and beyond - not just a report saying we've got "x number of links for you this month".

So cut through the bollocks I thought I'd give my list of factors to look out for. Then its upto you to say which you agree with, which you'd like to look at in more detail and those where your own empirical evidence suggests otherwise.

First off, here's a quick screen grab of the sort of information available fro SEO Spyglass:



There's a whole load to cogitate on in there. But when ever you use information such as that, keep these value factors in mind:

1) Leave "Page Rank" at your office door - it induces laziness and is the currency of the ill-informed.


2) Authority/Trust of the page - consider the number and nature of the links to that individual 3rd party page by viewing its link profile both internally and externally.

Look at how many links the site gives to it internally.


3) Anchor text - Think about the contents of the anchor text and try and make it relevant to your target keywords.

Don't make the link text standardised across all of your link-building efforts.

On the domain buying front this concept adds weight here.


4) Other Links Out - look at how many other links there are pointing out on that page and build that into your calculation of the value you'll get out of them.


5) Other Off-Page Links - look at the number of links out of the page to other pages on the site.


6) Link Location - I've said this for years. Links in footers, separated by pipes are big give away and, I believe, are devalued to a significant amount. Links in blogrolls, I believe, I reduced a touch.


7) Contextual Nature of Links - I'm lumping a few factors here, but I believe the distance other keywords on the page are to the link has a relative impact on the relevance of the link.


8) Relevance of the Page - This is related to 7) but looks a bit more holistically. I can't put my finger on it, but I'm roughly putting this at 8) but could well be lower.


9) Reciprocal Linking - My views on this have changed over time. Just like the other factors, I've come to view this a case of degree and context. If you over do it (say 80% of your links are reciprocated) then you may have a problem. But then this is further factors by what is the "norm" in your niche. If everyone is doing it, and the search engines don't view your industry as being one of the highly competitive ones, then it may well prove not to be an issue.


10) Anchor Text Age
If you're looking at a potential site to get a link from because your competitor does, consider that that link may be imparting more weight because its been around longer. If you get a link you may get a quick boost for it, but that benefit may decay in the short/medium term.

Consider this when you look at the benefits you could from your link-building campaign - do you need a short term boost, or a long term benefit?


There are many other factors with decreasing levels of importance. But its crucial to understand that each of these factors not only depends on the competitive nature of your industry, but how you apply them will further depend on what you actually need to increase your link profile by a given %. What you need to implement may differ greatly from a site which you THINK has a very similar link profile to yours.