How to grade the links?

I've been reading so much on this forum but still can't comprehend how to value a backlink. For example, I have a financial site and if I were to submit it to the right aviva category it would be on a 0 PR page, but the aviva directory main page has a PR of 7. Does google value only the page in which my page is on or does it value the site as a whole? I don't want to spend 40 bucks on a PR page of 0 without any other benefit.

So just wondering when adding links to sites I should be looking at what? At the momment I know I should take in consideration:

1) Page Rank of page itself
2) number of links
3) relevency of page to my site

Anything else? Thanks in advance guys/girls

 

Not sure if the order is precedence, but if it is. I would def say #3 = #1 , #2 = #2 and #1 = #10 (ie an overrated metric)

I would also check the cache date of the page as well. You dont want a link on a page that hasnt been cached in months if not years.

 

thanks manageyourlinks, ya I wasn't putting them in any order, thanks for the reply

 

actually speaking there are many many factors to check like traffic , true page rank , out bound links , inbound links , no follow tags , alexa ranking , back links quality , serp and many more

you can check everything at www.tradeweblinks.com/free-seo-tools/

thank you
keyur parmar

 

i thought they just always looked at alexa ranking, traffic, links, etc...

 

There is a tone of stuff that you can do to your site to improve PR and traffic. Google has a fairly complex grading method that is kept quite secret, but in my SEO activities I have found that the higher the PR of a page you are linked on the higher its PR credit to your page. Get as many as you can and optimize your content. Content is king and you always derive the traffic benefit from organic search results which in turn improve PR.

 

PR is good to get up in google, but you should also keep an eye on backlinks because other engines like Yahoo or MSN like those (from my experience).