If you’re familiar with search engine optimization (SEO) you’ll know that getting QUALITY back-links is critical to moving your website up in the search engine results pages (SERPs). Getting a few links from trusted and authoritative websites beats getting a lot of links from “junky” or irrelevant websites every time.

So too, as SEO expert Michael Gray says in a recent blog post, most SEOs would define a good back-link as:

“a keyword rich link from a well linked/important/popular page on a trusted and authoritative website, that is preferably topically relevant to your site.”

Mr Gray goes on to point out the major problem with a definition like this: there is no publicly available or agreed upon metric for what is a “trusted and authoritative website”!

While search engine optimizers will point to sites such as the New York Times or the Wall
Street Journal as trusted and authoritative websites, that isn’t much help to webmasters who have little hope of ever getting a back-link from such news sites.

Consequently, Gray advises webmasters to:

1. Do your research and consider all the available metrics – such as Page Rank, Alexa, Compete, Technorati, Quantcast, Hitwise and Feedburner – looking for correlations between such metrics; and

2. Consider the blogs in your space to see who is getting the most links.

I would also add this:

3. Consider the content of the website. Does it strike you as being of high quality?

If a site scores highly on all the above-mentioned metrics, has tons of links, and is of a high standard… chances are it’s considered reasonably trusted and authoritative by the search engines.

And if you get mixed results for a given site, do what all search engine optimizers do: use your judgment!

Source: Michael, Gray, “Teaching Advanced Link Building and Why Pagerank Will Never Die”, GrayWolf’s SEO Blog, August 13, 2008

Related Articles:

• What Are The Most Important Factors For Getting a High Search Engine Ranking?
• Does Google Think SEOs are Criminals?
• 7 Ways To Measure Your SEO
• How To Increase Traffic and Sales With Long-Tail Keywords
• The New SEO – A Holistic Approach

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 19th, 2008 at 1:04 am and is filed under Kikabink Lab, Search Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.