Wiep Knol has put together a very useful list of the most important factors involved in building links for your website.
In the style of the SEOmoz search engine ranking surveys, Wiep has asked 17 SEO professionals about what makes a link valuable or not, and has listed the factors considered most significant.
We'll list the top link factors, as well as seven things which can have a negative effect on the value of links, but it's well worth taking a look at the full survey.
Nine link value factors:
- Anchor text - 4.6
- Age of the link - 3.6
- Type of link i.e. image or text - 3.5
- Text surrounding the link - 3.3
- Amount of links - 3.2
- The location of the link on the webpage - 2.9
- Reciprocal links - 2.9
- Where the link points to on a site - 2.9
- Location of link in source code - 1.9
Seven 'dampening factors' which may make links less useful:
- Robots.txt excluded page - 4.9
- Links on penalised pages - 4.5
- Javascript link - 3.9
- Redirect link - 3.9
- Bad neighborhood links are present on linking page - 3.6
- Paid Link triggers - 3.4
- Noindex page - 2.9
Related research:
SEO Guide - Link Building Strategies
Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.
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7:49AM on 11th December 2007
Thanks for posting this Graham but where can i find the link survey?
Editor at Econsultancy
10:22AM on 11th December 2007
Hi, the link is in the post above - here it is: http://wiep.net/link-value-factors/
2:02AM on 28th December 2007
First thing I noticed is how much difference there is between the two surveys. Wiep's one seems to concentrate much more on on-site factors such as titles and page text relevance. For the long term I'd disagree and say that the long-term link popularity, and a constant rate of acquisition of relevant links stands out.
Even in the short term there are factors such as domain names that aren't mentioned.
1:42PM on 31st July 2008
Agreed, organic steady link growth makes a good difference. Only need to worry about spiking though on big campaigns as this can get flagged as suspcious.
Also not mentioned file names and folder names.