Netalot

Here are a few concepts behind the power of links.

PageRank in general.
What is worth receiving a link from? Any site with a PageRank – PR – of 0 or 1 is useless. Don’t spend any effort on that. PR 2 is alright but not worth celebrating too much over. Aim for PR of 3 and 4. Higher than 4 is of course even better but as a start up blog it will be highly unlikely that you will be able to persuade higher ranked sites to link to you.

PageRank of the Home Page
It’s not always true that a site has the same PR on every page especially if the site got caught selling links on a previous occasion. Watch out for sites with high PR on their home page but once you look more closely at other pages on their site you find a great selection of PR 0. This is often the case for free directories/sites.

Alexa ranking.
Alexa ranks sites based on tracking information of users of its Alexa Toolbar for Internet Explorer and from integrated sidebars in Mozilla and Netscape. If a site ranks under 1,000,000 it may be considered alright. A ranking under 500,000 is really good and under 100,000 is great. Any ranking under 25,000 is amazing. This is a potential indicator of visitors you might get from the link, and not necessarily how powerful a link it is. Real people count too.

Your backlinks backlinks:
This rather awkward label refers to the backlinks a site has that you are interested in obtaining a backlink from. Evaluate these backlinks. Check them by typing in link:www.thedomainname.com into the search window of the relevant search engines.

How link populated is the page or site?
The site you wish to have a link from is linking out to hundreds of other websites. You will want to reconsider your link. Each link is diluted by the others as the power of the link is divided amongst all links.

Age of link
Like a good wine, the longer your link ages, the more valuable it becomes. Typically, you need a few months for links to really start counting.

Overall quality
Evaluate the blog for its overall quality. Would people find the content valuable? Would they find information that they like? If they visited your site, would they want to visit that site as well? Are there similar interests? Make a personal evaluation here.

Authority
Authority sites can be recognized by their backlinks, their inbound to outbound link ratio, and more. Some of the highest authority sites tend to be educational with domain name extensions such as .edu’s and government as in .gov’s. Then there are news sites, research and industry portals. These high authority sites tend to have many inbound links from good sites but rarely link out to other sites and definitely not poor quality ones.

As with all things internet and especially Google, there are many factors that determine how things work. And often they may change without notice. Google in particular is rather autocratic when it comes to implementing its new algorithms. Be aware of this when creating your backlinks and keep your eye on your blog’s analysis of visitors and backlinks.