6 minute link partner evaluation
Author: Joe Whyte
Text link ads, performencing, text link brokers and other contextual advertising venues are full of abuse. People are buying a pr6 link for over 1000 a month and getting no SEO benefit from it what so ever because the site is either whored out, black listed or using black hat techniques and many people are being taken advantage of. The reason people are being taken advantage of is because link buyers and link developers do not know the true value of a link and how to asses that value. I have been doing link development for quite sometime now and I have devised a 6 minute quick link partner evaluation that I think will help many people when considering a link partner.
Age of website
A good website will be years old. The older the site the more trust rank a webpage will have from search engines like google. The reason google penelizes new sites is because a lot of them do not make it past its first year. Linking to a site with a long history shows stability and a stable inbound linking structure is a stable ranking and PR for your site. Download search status ff plugin or check out Wayback Machine.
Alexa Rank
I have seen a ton of sites that have a high PR but their traffic looks like 1 person visits their site each month. Although the PR is high it is quite possible that they used a black hat inbound linking structure to get that PR and I would stay away from those sites. Plus contextual advertising is NOT just for seo but it is also for traffic so keep this in mind when deciding to place and purchase your text links.
Pages indexed
The more pages that are indexed gives weight to a sites search engine saturation and its overall weight. The more content the better the site. If you see that there are only a few pages showing up when checking pages indexed but you know there are thousands of pages on the site then this draws a red flag and you should look into this further to find out why this is. I use some of the seo tools over at webmaster my domain.
Link Partners inbound Linking Structure
Make sure you check randomaly the inbound links coming into your potential link partners site. Are they FFA, reciprocals or linking schemes? Are they links from sites like link metro and link market? If so stay away from these pages because you do not want to get caught in a bad linking neighborhood. Reciprocal linking is an older form of linking and is dated. FFA and sites like link metro and link market are considered spammy crap links in the industry and you will not find any reputable websites joining these schemes. note: all linking has its place but if you are working on a white hat site then stay away from them, if you are working on a black hat site then link spam away 
. I love Aaron walls seo for firefox plugin for this. I can see what compeitors linking scheme is pretty easily.
Does link partner rank for its keywords
Any decent website will rank for some or all of the terms within its title tag. Although if the market is very competitive you might not find them in the top 3 pages but make sure you look into this. It only takes a minute and can save you from making a big linking mistake. You do not want to associate yourself with sites that do not rank because its possible YOUR site might not rank.
Is Site relevant
Over ANYTHING relavance is the most important. If your site is about web hosting then you need to have web designers, seo, web hosting, blogging, web development sites linking back to you. There are exceptions to this and those are your tld .gov’s .edu’s, news websites and your social media.
How many outbond links
Expert sites are equal to enthusiast sites and will normally link to authority sites which are ground breaking news worthy sites people trust. Authority sites usually do NOT link out to other websites (unless quoting or doing contextual advertising). This is one way search engines can try to varify weather or not a site is leaning towards authority or expert.
Is page Cached
If someone is going to place a link on a page of their website MAKE SURE THE PAGE IS CACHED, plan and simple.
Are their any black hat techniques being used on this site
Check to see if any sneaky redirects are happining, is there hidden text? Are they cloaking? These are things you will want to check. If you associate yourself with someone who does these things then you are associated yourself with a bad apple and this WILL affect your rankings.
What is the pages PR
PageRank is not my number one of course because in my mind PageRank is a stupid green bar that makes people try to sell me contextual advertising for 600% markup. When considering a link partner I personally have had good luck with sites OVER PR5 but let me tell you a secret.
Co-citation
Co-citation has to do with the type of links on a site. A good example of what cotitation is over at directory revolution. News sites are notorious for selling contextual advertising to anybody so we have casino, hospital, tax attorny and so on listed on there sites. Now google’s algorythim is going to co-citation these links and basically assume they are all connected SOMEHOW so the last thing you want is to see your site assocaited with casino sites or adsense sites.
Current amount of text link ads
The amount of text link ads is important. A recent post over at matt cutts was discussing how google devalued outbound links on harvard.edu because it was selling text link ads. General rule of thumb is to keep it below 15, some say 10. In my opinion if you where the ONLY person advertising on that site and your link was NO WHERE near anything that said sponsors, advertisments, friends etc then that would be the very best situation.
I like cooking and all of these steps are equal to ingrediants which together all make a perfect pie. Now if one or two ingrediants are missing you can still make your pie but it might not taste as good ya see? By following this list and using these tools you will get a good assumption on how well this link partner might help you in the SERPS. Its important to remember that PR is being widely used these days to configure contextual advertising which is like bidding wars for compeititve terms in PPC. You don’t want to find yourself exploding your budget by purchasing expensive links on worthless sites.
Great post Joe. Very thorough and detailed! We use a plugin for Firefox called “SEO for Firefox” and it does an awesome job of telling us the SEO information of a URL when we are sifting through SERPs.
Ya, the SEO for Firefox ( over at SEObook.com) is a great tool. I just recently broke down and downloaded it. I already have a coulple REALLY good FF extensions like Web Developer, SEOpen and AGENTswitch, but the SEO for Firefox was a great addition to checking SERP information on the fly.
That was a good read Joe, thanks for sharing.
You are so right too, there is a LOT of naivety in this link market.
Posts like these help people make informed decisions, all power to you!