Not all links are created equal. Choose quality over quantity

Links are a key factor in determining how highly a site will be listed in the SERPs or Search Engine Results Pages. The more links pointing to your website, the higher it is likely to appear in the search results. Google, in particular, places special emphasis on incoming links to a web page, they pioneered the concept of “Link popularity”. According to Google, it’s robots “jump from page to page on the web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we will find you.”

Not all links are created equal - some are more valuable than other. Links from sources such as guestbooks, link farms etc. are considered useless. Links from quality websites are far more beneficial, websites that are rich in content, providing useful information to it’s visitors. Therefore, it’s necessary for all webmasters to evaluate the worth of an incoming link from a web page. One of the ways to evaluate the worth or the “importance” of a website is by installing the Google Toolbar.

The Google toolbar displays the “PageRank “ of a website. PageRank is Google’s way of indicating the importance of a web page. The PageRank offers a rough estimate of such importance on the Google toolbar, on a scale of 0 to 10. A page with a high PR is more important than a page with a low PR.

Even though PageRank is an important factor in judging the importance of a website, it is not the only factor. It is only one of many factors Google uses to determine it’s search rankings. Therefore, links from any website with a high PR may not be very useful.

Here are a few more factors taken into consideration to determine the quality of incoming links.

Relevance. Incoming links from a website that is on a closely related topic to yours, or dealing in the same products, services or information are worth more than links from a unrelated field. For example, an online flower shop linked to by a wholesale flower dealers website, this would benefit the online flower shop a great deal more than being linked to by an car dealers website.

Context. The Location and context of an incoming link do matter. A contextual link would be one that appears within the content of a website, as opposed to within the “Links” section of a web site. A contextual link would benefit a website greater than a non contextual one.

Anchor Text. Anchor text is the text used to describe your site in the incoming link. Google gives a lot of importance to the anchor text of incoming links. For example, a link with the text “Martha’s Flower shop – Deliveries across the country” is worth more than “Click here for Flowers”.

Link Density. Link density is simply the amount of links on a web page. A link from a webpage that contains a hundred links is not as useful as a link from a page that has fewer links. It is important for webmasters to check the link density of the web page that will host the incoming link.

These were few of the conditions that increase/decrease the quality of a link. Every wise webmaster would check these conditions before accepting a link from a web site.

From the above, we can see that though incoming links are a crucial part of any search engine optimization campaign, it is important to judge the quality. When it comes to incoming links, quality should be considered over quantity because not all links are equal.