The idea of writing this article, which I believe will be helpful to many of you, raises after a recent request of links I was looking here on DP's BST section (which turned out to be a big waste of time and failure, just for the record). If you have any other suggestions to add to make this article better and share mo information's with the others, please leave a comment. Determine quality of your site Before you even go after looking for link inventory on for your site you should first determine the quality of YOUR OWN site first. Why is that? Simple, if you know how much time, effort and links you have built so far for your site to have a certain authority, to start ranking and to have a homepage strong enough to give link juice to your inner pages and help them rank, then you will exactly know what type of site you want to link to yours and what type of link juice would that site bring to you. Once you have determined the quality of your site, you will then start looking for links on sites that have EQUAL quality as your site OR even HIGHER. This can be determined by few factors such as: Inbound links that the site has The quality of those links that the site has Google pagerank of that current site (even tho this isn't a big factor, but however does help, trust me) The outgoing links of that site (make sure it doesn't link to bad sites or to off-topic sites, those are too easy to be tracked and penalized) So we presume you have a site that has 2k of inbound links, all the inbound links are coming from other websites that are closely related to your sites topic, your sites has a pagerank of 4 and your outgoing links are strictly to sites that are related to your niche/topic. In consequence you want a site that has similar inbound link amount as yours, you want that sites inbound links to be from closely related resources (i.e. same topic/niche), and you want that site to have at least a PageRank as yours or even little smaller (in this case a PR of 3) and even most important, take your time, do not rush, and check, if necessary, all the inner pages of this site. See where it links and how often it links. And one more, very important thing you want to check is the history of the site. Was it always of the same topic/niche, or it got revamped to suit the business model for the link seller (thing which very often happens here in DigitalPoint, and it is a sad thing as it ruins the BST section completely, as far as it regards me, in the link building business. In my recent experience I ended up finding 40% of the sites offered to me to be revamped and made to suit the current "request" model. I would get advertised a previously "contemporary philosophy" site for something completely unrelated, creative guy when revamped the site). Things you don't want a site that links to yours to have This should be pretty straight forward, anything that can harm your site you should avoid, this includes but is not limited to: Revamped sites that have changed completely the topic/niche Sites that are built with the sole purpose of making money by selling textual links or blog posts A site that links to completely unrelated sources (even from deep pages) (now immagine how natural would it be that a sports related site links to a medical coding one?) A site that links to bad neighborhood links or is in a link network of its own A site that has one or more of these factors can be easily detected, tracked down, flagged, penalized or even banned. And you don't want a site that is flagged, penalized or banner to be linking to your site, at all, you want to stick away from such sites as far as possible. Negative impact such sites linking to yours can have If you think that that will be his own problem if he gets his site flagged, penalized or banned then you are wrong. If a site that links to yours is flagged your site could be also counted in as one of his network sites and have your site flagged as well. If you get flagged you will no longer be able to pass juice to your inner pages and most likely will start losing rankings with your inner pages. If a site from where you got a link gets a PageRank penalization, in that case your site will no longer receive that link juice it used to receive when it had pagerank. Which results into wasting time and effort for you, so you now need to replace those links and get more quality links. Benefits from avoiding such sites to link to yours Even the benefits should be plain simple and clear. If no flagged, penalized, banned site is linking to yours then you will not be risking to get flagged, penalized or even banned. In addition, while avoiding to get links from such sites you will save loads and loads of time, which then you can invest into looking a more quality resources, you will most likely even help to clean up the web by cutting the nasty business of these co called webmasters. The main business of these webmasters is to sell links, if they can't do that then they are out of their business. The effort they put into creating such sites is minimal, the risk that these sites could harm you is very high, so stick away from them, all the time. Tools to get similar site information's on the fly If you don't have other softwares or tools to gather such data then you might consider using Aaron Wall's SEO Toolbar for firefox. It is just an addon and can be installed quickly. Already got a link from one of those nasty sites and got penalized, and now you wonder how to fix it? If you feel that something went wrong after your last link building inventory then go back and double check all of the sites, if you end up in a site that has similar characteristics as the ones I described, track down the webmaster and ask him to remove the link from the site. Pretty simple no? If in case you can't track down the webmaster, you will be forced to now build MORE quality links to your site so that link would appear as an isolated case. Even a better fix? Double check the sites before you even decide to ask them for a link. Do not waste your time, money and cause stress to your self wondering why your sites ranking starts to sink down into the second page or even deeper. I have seen just too many site owners to ruin their sites by making these simple mistakes that I could not handle not to write about this. If you have other suggestions and/or tips please comment bellow, and help the others to avoid being sucked into such link networks by these so called webmasters and their intriguing messages.
Wow, very informative! Thanks for sharing.. I need to read a lot of backlink articles since I just started doing backlinks. This article made me realize to choose closely which sites we want our sites to link in.
Definitively Rendon. Even tho many times you will hear someone say "any link is welcome" but that is simply not true. A single link can ruin your hard work.
Good one TS. Backlink building is not as easier as it looks, one has to analyse the sites being linked.
I am glad all of you for appreciating the article and finding it useful (that was it's intention). Hope you will put in act these advise so they become part of your daily routing and not just another article you have read. And thanks to all those that have gave me a rep for the article. Appreciate it.
I want to add another one. Sites with high PR on homepage but PR0 on simple pages like /about /search /lings. Don't go there!
Haha, weird that I missed that point..or thought would be covered in the "revamped sites" sentence all in one. However DeanH is RIGHT, sites that have a high PageRank for the homepage but inner pages (even the simple about page) don't have a pagerank at all (not even white bar) are most likely revamped sites, which translated would mean: worthless sites.
You are all welcome guys. Feel free to use the article as you please, read it, use the methods for your own good or even share it with others. I am glad I could contribute and help you guys have a wider picture of what you want for your site and what you really should stick away from. Wish you all the best.
Good show. Just to add my 2 cents. You may also want to check out the website's (that is linking to you) backlink strategy.
Very true, some people think any backlink is good - but this is simply not true. In fact, having a backlink on a viagra selling, malware infested porn site could actually have very negative effects on your ranking.
I am glad you guys find it useful You can always check the backlinks for your site through Yahoo (as it is showing more links then most of the search engines). I know that might be annoying to check each link one by one, but there are also seo softwares that do use backlink analyzes and can give you a better picture.
Link building is not as easy as it sounds,because a silly mistake can spoil your whole project of SEO.The point you discussed about to check for quality of a site is very informative.Thanks for it.