Anatomy of a Power Link.

[jimmifli]

Not all links are created equal. I think everyone knows that. But few people consider all the factors that go into a strong link.

The obvious ones:
Page Links - Does the link page have lots of links to it?
Pages with lots of links are valuable. Look for pages with internal (site owner thinks it's an important page) and external links (the rest of the internet thinks it's an important page too) pointing to that page.

Outbound Links-Does the page have many outbound links?
Pages with lots of links out dilute the trust passed through each link. Look for pages with only a few outbound links. Make sure they point at trusted sites.

Indexed - Is the page indexed?
Check if there is a Google cache and how old the cache is. This gives you an idea of how often Google crawls the page. If it's not in the cache it's probably not worth the effort.

Page Age - How old is the page?
Pages that have been around for a while have a lot of trust. Check how old the domain is and if that page available in WBM. Old pages are great.

Anchor Text - Does the link have your keyword in the anchor text?
Word of warning, in your site's overall link profile, anchor text links should make up a small number of total links.

I skipped page rank, because if the page meets the above requirements it probably has a pretty good PR and these factors are more important.

Now some less obvious ones:

Relevance - how close is the topic to your topic?
The ideal page will have your keyword in the title tag and throughout the body copy.

Placement - Where is the link located on the page?
A footer, sidebar, header or comment link isn't as valuable as one from the main body copy of the text. Look for words like: links, ads, sponsors etc... if they are above your link followed by a list, odds are the link value has been discounted. Links pages are worth even less.

I'm not saying that links that don't meet these criteria aren't valuable, just that links like these would have more value.

tldr:
links from the main body copy of old pages with few outbound links and lots of inbound links are really awesome.

[hooperman]

Good list, jimmi.

Anchor Text - Does the link have your keyword in the anchor text?
Word of warning, in your site's overall link profile, anchor text links should make up a small number of total links.

That's an interesting thing to say. I wouldn't have thought a larger proportion of links with good anchor text would hurt you.

I've just had a quick check on one of my sites (not a rigorous test!) and the majority of links have variations of descriptive phrases for the anchor text. No link building has been done so the links are all natural.

[jimmifli]

Good list, jimmi.

That's an interesting thing to say. I wouldn't have thought a larger proportion of links with good anchor text would hurt you.

I've just had a quick check on one of my sites (not a rigorous test!) and the majority of links have variations of descriptive phrases for the anchor text. No link building has been done so the links are all natural.

It's not that it hurts you necessarily. It's that future links using exact anchor text are likely to be discounted.

For example, let's say you try to rank for the word "mortgage broker", and you go get a bunch of article links with that as the anchor text. That's fine, and a reasonable strategy. But let's say that page has 1000 links, and 900 are the exact same anchor text with no variation. 100 are natural with most being the url and a few "click here" type anchor's. Now you talk with the owner of a really great mortgage broker site and he agrees to link to your site with perfect anchor text.

The problem is that your link profile doesn't look natural, it looks like you are trying to get lots of anchor text links for "mortgage broker", and because of that Google is likely to discount all links with that anchor text. So you get a small bump from 900 articles and would have got a really huge one from this new link but it's discounted.

How this is actually accomplished is unknown to me. I suspect your site's link profile is compared with the top 100 sites ranking for that keyword and if something is out of whack it faces penalties. My recommendation is to save your anchor text on your main keywords for your best links.

[jimmifli]

One more piece of advice. Google views navigational searches as incredibly important. They want to get them right 100% of the time.

What is a navigational search? A search looking for a specific entity; a store, a national park, the local library or a business. So lets say someone searches for "London Web Designer" is this a navigational search? Probably not. But what if there is a company called www.londonwebdesigner.com? Well that would certainly be navigational since the search could be looking for that specific company. So Google wants to be sure that if you were looking for that company you can find it, there is a good chance it will rank very well for that query (even with fewer links than competing sites).

But in addition, if you were to look at the link profile for a domain like that you would expect to see a high % of "London Web Designer" as anchor text, since it is the name of the business. Now it wouldn't be fair for Google to discount those links, since it is the name of the business.

Moral of the story, exact word domains have a big advantage because they can be very aggressive with their anchor text.

[flipfilter]

That title seems a little familiar

Good article.

[Edo]

It's not that it hurts you necessarily. It's that future links using exact anchor text are likely to be discounted.

Interesting theory but do you have any evidence for it? I've seen people rank very highly for competitive phrases doing the exact opposite: targetting one keyword as anchor text and just running with that and nothing else.

[jimmifli]

Interesting theory but do you have any evidence for it? I've seen people rank very highly for competitive phrases doing the exact opposite: targetting one keyword as anchor text and just running with that and nothing else.

Lots, but nothing I could post, so like everything posted in forums you should use your own judgement and experience to evaluate my posts.

The thing that's so difficult with SEO is that you don't actually know how your site is scored. You just know how it is scored relative to other sites. That makes it really hard to know if one strategy is better than another. I'm not saying that going after a single word isn't an effective strategy, I'm just saying that a better strategy would be to save your anchor text for the best links.

Also consider, for most really competitive terms, the sites at the top of the SERPs have so many links that it's tough to over do your linkbuilding. It's possible to go crazy and still only add a few percentage of the total links (thinking of niches like webhosting).

[Clinton]

Neighbourhood Links: Where do the links just before and after yours go and are they to pages Google regards highly for a particular term? If so you gain reputation by association.

[jimmifli]

Neighbourhood Links: Where do the links just before and after yours go and are they to pages Google regards highly for a particular term? If so you gain reputation by association.

Co-citation is very over looked. I typically don't talk about it on public forums.