CainIV - 4:18 am on Nov 28, 2011 (gmt 0)

Good idea. We use a pre-qualification list after prospecting.

My 0.02

- look at link attributes for footprints: position on page, anchor text, incontent, there's more.

Relationship with other websites, types of websites previously advertised, text on the advertising page referring to how the website advertises and number of pages without advertising versus number of pages with advertising (aka outbound text links) is important in my experience.

Oh yes there is - all the sites you get backlinks will meet the original criteria from the crawler were sites were selected to be contacted. That's a footprint. And it's probably a footprint a mile wide too.

Absolutely. On way around this is to create a link grid, where you pursue links on a priority level based on a random series of BOTH website type and anchors used.

So for example, you might do the following:

Blog / guest post
organization / association link
paid directory
resources page link
top 10 blog post listing
link bait inbound link
Blog / guest post
etc.

This throws diversity into the chain of events further reducing the pattern. (Inevitably there are only so many ways to develop links, that some will *always* be patterns)

Map out anchors according to competitive aggregate anchor levels on a sliding scale from aggressive to low-threshold, and map those directly into an excel or similar chart so that you can stay diversified.

Stay away from networks altogether is my experience.