Determine Quality Links
Before trying to make link acquisition by those sites that you found linking to your competitor’s sites you should evaluate them. How to determine quality links? Analyze your potential linking partners:
• Consider the age of the domain you are going to acquire a link from. Site that has been in existence for a long period of time is likely to have grater effect on your organic ranking. Find the age of a domain.
• Make sure that pages have unique and relevant content to your page’s subject matter. Search engines might diminish the impact of links obtained from sites that publish duplicate content.
• Try to acquire as many as possible links with .edu and .gov top-level domain extensions. You can find the site with these extensions by typing in Yahoo search linkdomain:www.linkpartnersite.com inurl:edu.
• Request links from Web site that already rank well for the keywords and terms you are targeting.
• The link popularity (the number of other websites linking to a site) of a Web site affects the value of all the links in hosted documents on the site. Highly linked to sites will provide more value in their links than sites whose link popularity is low. So, the more link popularity of your link partner, the more value is provided by the links from his/her Web site.
• Check the sites Traffic Rankings. Links from high traffic pages will then pass some of their traffic to your Web page. Visit www.alexa.com and determine the traffic rank of your potential linking partner. Aim for sites with Alexa rankings of less than 100,000. The lower Alexa number is the more traffic site receives.
• A quality link partner should itself possess a large number of quality incoming links.
• Google Page Rank of your link partner is important, you should be looking for link partners which PageRank is higher than yours. However obtaining links from high authority, trusted Web sites on the basis of criteria listed above is more important for a successful link-building.