Gut Feeling: Tools & Tips for Identifying Valuable Links

[caption id="attachment_3137" align="alignleft" width="300"] Finding websites and blogs that will bring value to your site requires playing detective. Photo credit: olarte.ollie / Foter / CC BY-SA[/caption] This is a brief outline on how to identify a website or blog that will bring a valuable link to your site, or a link worth pursuing and maybe even, (god forbid), paying for. Obviously, there are exceptions, but this is a good starter and following this will not lead you astray. CAVEAT: there are exceptions to everything I say in this…we’re talking about the Internet. When I say something is X-way, what I really mean is that it is usually, with some exceptions, X-way.

Lesson One: Gut Feeling

The simplest way to determine whether a site or blog is a link worth pursuing is to listen to your intuition. Put on “Gut Feeling,” sit back and just look at the site. Take it in and ask yourself these questions:

• Does it look like someone put time into this?
• Is there a custom logo, or it just text?
• Does the page have nice design, is it aesthetically pleasing? [Also, is the inverse true: Is the design so poor you can’t believe that some goof actually made this?]
• Is the CSS customized?
• What’s the user experience like?
• Are there custom title tags? Does the site even have title tags?
• Is it just a long list of various articles? [THIS IS A HUGE RED FLAG!] I’ll get more into this later, but because the home page has the highest PR [page rank] and PA [page authority], people who are making sites to post links to a money site [your main site],  usually always have this format so that the link value for their customers doesn’t degrade.

Lesson two: Page Rank

Page Rank is a metric that Google has been continuously devaluing. Named after Larry Page, page rank used to give pages a 1-10 ranking based on relevance and authority. Page rank used to be able to tell you a lot. However, its value is diminishing. A.) It is, [mostly!], no longer being updated... B.) The Google algorithm has fundamentally changed with Hummingbird. That said, page rank is a great first stop. I have a PR bar in all my browsers. Just go to the Chrome or Firefox extensions / add-ons store, (the only two browsers that you should use), and type in “page rank” and you’ll receive a ton of options. I use PageRank Status, (also gives traffic estimates). In general, you want a link on a site that has the highest PR. However, don’t discount a site that doesn’t have a high PR. DO DISCOUNT A SITE THAT HAS A PR -1.  It has been manually penalized by Google, is worth nothing, and could potentially harm you. Typically, I want at least a PR 1 on sites that I get links from. It was only last year that page rank stopped updating, and having an aged domain also helps with ranking. Generally, I like sites that have PR 3 or higher.

Lesson three: In Market?

With the exception of sites that are great in every other category, you want links coming from sites that are relevant to your site. For example, if you have a site about men’s grooming, it doesn’t make sense to have a link coming from an article about current events. Keep it relevant. General rule: if you make people laugh when you try to justify why a link should be on the page, don’t ask for a link.

Lesson Four: Toolbars [found in the extensions store]

There are several toolbars that you can install and use to evaluate sites that you’re considering getting links from. Moz Bar – find Page Authority [PA] and Domain Authority [DA] and social information. I think these are more important than PR. I like PA above 30 and DA about 25. SEO Quake – Alexa rank [lower the better], PR, pages indexed [more the better], age [older the better], social info [more the better], and a bunch of other stuff. Great toolbar. Ghostery – blocks tracking, but also shows you tracking and advertising. If this explodes when you visit a site, take heed. Alexa – ranks sites off of traffic. You can get this info with the SEO quake or pagerank toolbar. Gives you a good idea of traffic. Say you know that you have 10k visitors per month and you have an Alexa traffic rank of 490k. If a site is claiming to have 29k visitors per month, then why is their ATR 1mil+??

Lesson Five: Adsense Presence and Built for Adsense [BFA] Sites

Some people prefer quantity over quality. Build 500+ crappy sites and put ads over every square inch and hope to make a couple cents off of them every day, (or a lot more), and just rake in the money passively.  Strictly from a money-making standpoint, Build for Adsense (BFA) sites were not a bad idea. But Google algorithm updates crushed BFA sites -- under no circumstance should you put a link on a BFA site. BFA sites are notorious for using disreputable tactics to rank and may harm your site if you link to them. Example: http://www.luckysavings4you.com  [As you can see, most times they’ll fail a lot of tests before you get here – check out age and ghostery on this site]. I must clarify: having ads on your site does not mean that it’s a bad site. Every site that’s not ecom has ads on it. A bad site has excessive and ill placed ads on it.

Lesson Six: Paid Tools for Quality and Links

Some things are worth paying for, like these tools that help you analyze backlinks and measure quality. SEM RUSH – backlink analysis and really cool tools. Similar to moz. Open Site Explorer – free to a point, but part of Moz premium. AHREFS – backlink analysis and another PA / DA ranker. I love this tool and it’s usually a first stop. After you get the sense of a crap site, you can usually tell by referring domain URLS whether it’s a good site, (and I think their PA/DA is better than Moz’s).  Additionally, you can check cross links. Cross checking is important. Why? You know that person who constantly wants to give you links? This rogue owns several domains that all point to each other. He/she is actually bleeding you dry with contests and links on these sites. And when this punk gets busted for these nefarious practices, you’ll be implicated. [Pro Tip: Use AHREFS on a competitor’s site, rip all their links, and then you use vlookup in excel to identify opportunities for links.]

Lesson 7: URL: Would a URL by Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?

Check out the URL. If a site’s no good, the URL usually gives it away. Here are some things to look for when scrutinizing a site’s URL: Web 2.0 (bloggr, tumbr, etc): A fun and very smart black hat tactic of yesteryear was to build one thousand web 2.0 pages with keywords in the url and link them back to your money site and to one another. Google caught on to this and web 2.0 properties got the slap. Caveat: If the person actually has followers and people seemingly read the blog, yes, it is worth a link. Look through the people following them, don’t just look at the number. Numbers don’t tell you anything; you can buy numbers from people named AIEKDAL kaKDAI. Non-politically correct tip: If your site is targeted towards mothers, look at the followers’ names. Do they sound like upper-middle class white women, (the people who use sites like that), or do they sound like they're posting from somewhere in Siberia?  More on this in social signals. Lots of dashes & numbers in the URL: Generally frowned upon and especially frowned upon if matched with EMD. EMD [Exact Match Domain]: Got slapped by Google. That said, I, anecdotally, think non-long tail EMD do very well in search engines. However, long tail, dashed out, number filled urls are not good. So, www.best-soap-4-oily-skin.com is not a good place to drop a link, (obviously that is an exaggeration), but that’s the idea. Or funcraftysavvymom.blogspot.com.

Lesson 8: Social Signals

Social media can give you a lot of insight into the quality of a link. It’s simple: look at the followers. Are these real people? Numbers don’t tell you anything. You can buy followers. Furthermore, you can now buy segmented followers – [i.e. Moms]. So names are out. How about favorites? I generally use Twitter for all my scouting to determine whether someone’s social metrics are real. If a person has 5200 followers and has only received 222 favorites out of her 3814 tweets, that’s not a very good, or real ratio. BUSTED. [Shady tip: if you’re ever making a brand style website I’d encourage you to buy 500 or 1000 followers on FB and Twitter. It is cheap legitimacy and people are more likely to follow you if you already have people following you. Who trusts, or takes seriously, someone with 46 twitter followers? I do not encourage anyone to buy G+ followers. And if you / your client isn’t actually going to engage on Twitter / Facebook, don’t buy any followers.]

Lesson 9: Contact and About Us page

Pretty easy: Does the site in question have them? If it’s any good, it will have those things. The contact page is especially important. Is there an address? Is there a name? If not, it’s probably not someone who cares too much about their site.

Lesson 10: Wayback Machine: TEH INTERNETZ ARCHIVE & Whois

How old is this site? How many times has it changed hands? Has it always been a site about X-topic? http://archive.org/web/  & whois.com, respectively. Or SEO Quake toolbar. Old = gold. Summary: This sounds like a lot, but really, all this stuff takes 5 minutes. There’s a lot of crap on the Internet. The important thing is making it so that your crap don’t stink.