Qualifying Link prospects as Adria Saracino indicates in her in depth SEOMOZ article, is a really good idea for SEO’s, now more than ever. As was indicated in our Post Penguin SEO post, content curation to build online authority should make up a lot of your SEO efforts. However, links are still important, but SEO’s need to qualify link prospects to insure that they are getting the best possible links for their target urls.
Link Strength Factors
In her article, Adria suggests some key practices you should use when qualifying any possible link partners; which include:
- The Domain Authority number
- The number of linking root domains
- Page Authority
- Attributes such as no-followed vs. followed, clean external links and how many links are on the page.
- How the domain and URL is structured
- Check when the page was last updated
- Check for bylines and bios to find contact information
- Figure out how engaged the audience is, look for certain cues: number of comments and social shares, number of RSS feeds and newsletter subscribers, and number of social media followers.
- Check out the content. Look at titles, read the about page and the navigation and footer links (you want to see write for us or contributors).
- Determine the trustworthiness of a site. You can use outbound link checker
After you have determined the level of the site you can use a bucket system. This just means you list the prospects as high value, medium value and low value.
The article concludes with good advice on being organized, efficient, and creating a positive workflow. To learn more about each one of the above tactics, you should check out the SEOMOZ article The Definitive Guide to Qualifying Link Prospects.
Link Prospecting – a Good or Bad Idea?
What are your thoughts about the article or about qualifying link prospects in general?
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