Hi, I'm relatively new to this forum and SEO, so please bare with me. I am trying to determine or find an algorithm that can help me understand how valuable each backlink is to my site. This will be useful for me to determine how best to conduct in-house link building and/or how effective off-site link building might be for my site. I have done some research, and I believe I know the most valuable components of a link. I am not particularly interested in black hat methods. The consensus on these seems to be that they suck. So here the components of a link that seem to matter, in the order I think they go in. 1) context/relevance 2) SERP value for particular keyword 3) Pagerank 4) placement on page deal breaker (link is worthless from SEO standpoint if the following are true) noindex or nofollow linkfarm or spam site other? I'm not including things like anchor text because these are things I presumably have control over, and should be always optimizing for... are there big things I'm missing here? Is there an easy way to create values for each of these and compile them into one score? Any tools that anyone knows of for this? Thanks for you help!
I found this article on Link Value Factors (wiep. net/ link-value-factors/) which seems pretty comprehensive. It doesn't totally jive with some of the assumptions that I made above, but I used it to weigh the different factors of building a link, since they give the average weight they assign each of these characteristics. Here is what I came up with: 2.3TBPR+3.2page relevance+2.9placement+4.6anchortext+3.9keyword serp+4.1inverse number of links on page+2.3TLD(for .gov or .edu) this gives me a crude number to get an idea for how each link placement compares to the next. i'm not using every link value indicator available because some are less relevant for what i'm doing or much harder for me to track. for each value i give it a value between 1-10 so the weighting is even. i figure even if the final number is not very helpful, this will give me a good idea of where i'm successful and i may be able to fine tune once i have more data. Thoughts? Are there reasons why this is the completely wrong way to go about this?
Outgoing links on the page is certainly a factor. A couple of software companies have a link value indicator included in the software.
I know SEO Elite has a "link Value" indicator but I am not sure how it is calculated. i would assume that the Pr of the page, and the number of outgoing links would be the 2 easiest factors to calculate.
jharrow, you certainly seem to understand the fundamentals of link building, three of your top four are, in my opinion, the big three: PR, relevance, and anchor text. However, I think you're driving yourself crazy trying to figure out the algo specifics for two reasons: 1. Any formula you get is based 100% on someone's opinion. Only google knows what google likes and certainly is the only one where the relative values you're seeking exist. 2. The google algo is constantly evolving, with the end goal being to think like a human. So while it's good to know the important things to look for in quality backlinks, I think you're overcomplicating the situation. Just know the basics, learn a few strategies, and think like a human. Hope that helps, any more q's, feel free to pm me, I have been link building for a while.
mauik, Thanks for the response. I kind of know that I over did it here, but it's good to see that at least someone gets what I'm trying to do. The problem with the "think like a human" argument, even though it is right, is it is much harder to present to someone who has less knowledge about SEO and linkbuilding and have them accept that (and to just wait a few months and watch analytics for results). We'll see how much time I spend trying to keep up w/ my "calculator" and how the numbers it generates seem to line up w/ my own human sense of things. I'll keep this post updated.
You're right, it's a complicated thing, I keep learning every day myself. I'm interested to find out your results, either way. Good Luck!