Link Building Criteria
When it comes to creating backlinks there are a number of criteria that we follow in order to ensure we get the best and most natural links for your website. Each of the following are considered as part of our link building methodology and from experience we believe that the most important criteria is ‘relevance’ so we place a lot more emphasis on this relative to everything else.
Anchor text variation: We provide a variety of anchor text backlinks which ensures that you have a natural link profile that will not be picked up by the latest Penguin algorithm filter. See ‘Are our links Penguin Proof/Compliant?‘ page for more details on this.
PageRank (PR): We take into account 2 PR variations:
- The PageRank of the ‘page’ where we get your backlink.
- The PageRank of the homepage of the website where we get your backlink.
It can make a big difference to how effective a link will be for your ranking if you can get the link on a page (Home or inner page) with a high PageRank e.g. PR3 and higher. So if we can get links on 5 x PR4 pages that are highly relevant to your niche it will be much better, and faster, than getting links on 10 x PR2 pages.
There are certain types of links that still have some value even if the page on which the link appears doe not have any PageRank but the home page has a VERY high PageRank. For example Web 2.0 sites like WordPress, Blogger, Squidoo etc have home pages with a PR7 and higher so we also look at creating links on these sites too.
Relevancy: This criteria is also tied in with PageRank. We also take into account whether that page is relevant to our niche and whether the page already contains lots of outbound links to niche sites not relevant to ours e.g. you will find a lot of SEO selling links on high PR pages but a lot of the time the pages are full of spammy links which are for all sorts of niches like p0rn, gambling, weight loss etc. We make sure that your links do not end up on these sorts of pages.
DoFollow & NoFollow Links: It’s important that your link profile contains a variety of DoFollow and NoFollow links. This looks very natural and although lots of link sources e.g. blog comments, may well be set for NoFollow we record each link type so that we don’t end up with a 100% DoFollow link profile.
Domain Authority (DA): This is a metric that is provided by SEOMoz. It is a measure of how a website will perform in the search engine ranking. And has a measurement between the range of 0-100, with 100 being ‘excellent’. We will look at the DA and the Page Authority (PA) in relation to all the other link building criteria before deciding on whether a link will be good enough from the website in question.
Page Authority (PA): This is another metric provided by SEOMoz. It predicts the likelihood of a single page to rank well, regardless of what content is on the page. A higher PA number, taken from a logarithmic scale of 0-100, the greater the potential for that individual page to rank well in the search results.