Searching For Perfect Back Links | Resources | Net Age

There is a lot of discussion about the importance and quality of various links pointing back to your website, both in terms of the value that they pass on by means of PageRank, and in terms of their overall quality and relevance, both of which are important factors in determining the value of the link and of your site.

Since link development is an important part of search engine optimisation, here are some useful tips to bear in mind when you’re trying to develop the perfect back link.

Your Link Should Ideally…

• Be permanent, legitimate, free, one-way, non-reciprocal and static.
• Be placed on a page that is indexed, and has an assigned Google PageRank.
• Be placed on a page that has been updated, and cached by Google, Yahoo and Bing within the last 30 days.
• Be placed on a page that is not excluded from indexing by the robots.txt file, or any other method of exclusion.
• Not have the “nofollow” attribute, either in the link or on the page.
• Have an anchor text that contains your keywords, and is human readable.
• Be a text link. If it’s an image link, be sure it uses your keyword in the “alt” tag.
• Be from different IP addresses, and preferably from different nameservers.
• On a static page that does not use string parameters, session ID’s or other dynamic parameters.
• On a page that is search engine friendly, preferably ending with html, shtml, php, asp extensions, or using folder friendly path.
• Be from a website that is topically relevant to your subject, and preferably one that is authoritative.
• Come from a page that uses (at least mostly) the same language as your page.
• Be on a page with no more than 20 other outbound links. The fewer the better.

It’ll Be Even Better If…

• The site you link from is old, high ranking and authoritative, with data available from Alexa, Compete, Quantcast, Technorati and other sources.
• The link site is listed at Yahoo directory, DMOZ, Best of the Web and other important directories.
• The link site and page has indicators of interaction with social media sites like Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg and Twitter.
• As much attention is given to the quality and number of outbound links as to that of inbound ones.
• The age of the link page can be determined by the datestamp and last cache date.
• The “title=”Keyword” attribute can be included in the link html code.

It’s Not A Good Idea…

• To use terms like “links,” “link to us” or “view site” which may devalue the effectiveness of the targeted link.
• To use redirects, JavaScript links, hidden links, Flash sites, cloaking or framed pages.
• To accept links from scraper sites, mirror sites, link exchange hubs, link farms, ping sites, newsgroups, nofollow blog comments, spam forums, cookie-cutter affiliate sites, catch-all directories, spam article submission sites, free-for-all websites, sites with pharmaceutical products, illegal, hacker, warez, hacker/cracks, torrent, porn, violent, or hate-based, guest books heavily spammed, low value classifieds sites, dynamic links, ad bots, spam sites, or “black hat” sites.
• To put links on sites banned, black-listed or penalised by search engines.
• To put links on “in construction” sites.

In Conclusion

Follow these guidelines, and you’ll have quality, long-lasting links that will help improve your own sites importance in the eyes of major search engines.