Rate Websites for Linking

As optimisers, we come across plethora of options with regard to linking. However, we need to be judicious enough to understand the value of a link or the website it comes from.

The following points will help you decide if a link is worth pursuing:

1. The site should allow you to use anchor text as per your choice, so that you get to squeeze in your most important keywords therein.
2. Ensure that the link does not redirect to any other link. Avoid Javascript-based links as they are basically useless for optimisation purposes.
3. Check the Meta Robots Tag of the page. The page will not be indexed by search engines if this tag contains 'NOINDEX'. Such links will obviously not benefit your website.
4. Check the PageRank (PR) of the page you are linking to. Apart from that, also find out the number of backlinks the page has. All these factors are taken into consideration by search engines before determining PageRanks. Too many backlinks on your linking page can ruin the prospects of your own page.
5. Use online resources to find out about the traffic driven to the web page you want to link to. This will help you decide if such a link will be useful.
6. Find out if links are displayed in the cached version of the page? If not, then the page is using negative tactics to keep search engine spiders from identifying its outgoing links.
7. The page should not have a 'rel=NOFOLLOW' attribute, because most search engines will not follow such links.

Go through this checklist before you link to a website. Opt for links that can actually bolster your SEO campaign, and let go of the useless ones.