Page and Site Criteria for Link Weight

Help me identify the parameters and metrics you believe work.

[CainIV]

Hello everyone.

I am developing a link program / tool which basically works to help research links faster, better and will also assess, and actually place a rating on link value from a variety of sources.

The stage of the program I am on now is analysis. The program works to spider a wide range of pages based on preset filters, and then analyzes each page, at the page and site levels, to determine Value.

While I have a number of factors already added at this time, I feel that there would be some great value in getting opinions from WebmasterWorld in terms of criteria that YOU believe is important when deciding to capitalize on any given link.

Suppose, for you example, you had a "dream link" available for a project you work with.

What criteria would that link live by? What elements would you want to see. Site level, page level.

Several members of the forum are going to help me beta test the tool out when the time comes.

Send me your criteria :) I will start the list, please continue it on if you wish from here. I do not want to add more, since I would love to see what unique ideas everyone has on what their dream link looks like.

1. Link from a related page to the topic you publish
2. Dofollow link
3. Semi or fully targeted anchor to your keyword

[tedster]

- in the content area. This will not be an easy factor to automate, however. It took the major search engines several years to do visual page segmentation and fold that into their algorithms.

- shares the page with very few other links.

- a link that will drive traffic, and not just link juice. Again, I'm not sure how you would automate that metric without some visual page segmenting routine. Maybe just a combination of other factors would do it (font size, color, weight, in a sentence, underlined, etc.)

[CainIV]

Hi Tedster, thanks for input.

1. We can automate the assessment of a link in content from a quantitative aspect, but not a qualitative aspect. What we could do is test to see how many total phrases precede and follow the text link anchor.

We can also look at page repetition to try and deduce whether this is in the content area or template, but this is likely stage 2.

2. This is fairly easy to do.

3. Hmmm. Very difficult to do. Might need to think a bit on this one.

Anyone else have thoughts on this and additional criteria we might be able to use?

[wheel]

The primary thing I'd be looking for is some measure of the backlinks to either the domain or the page you're getting the link from.

Second behind that would be content relevance, however that's defined.

Lots of other issues, most of them secondary in my mind.

[JS_Harris]

The primary thing I'd be looking for is some measure of the backlinks to either the domain or the page you're getting the link from.

I prefer getting links mid article on freshly minted but high quality related pages myself. Second I value a good link structure on the site linking to mine so that the value flows for a long time. I feel like I've hit a grand slam when the page linking to me uses high value searched for keywords in its title too so that search visitors find the page...

There are lots of issues involved for sure.

[CainIV]

Title tag -definitely important to have as part of the algorithm. Thanks!

[Fgump910]

I remember asking this same sort of question awhile back. I was actually just trying so see if an objective "Link Value" existed - it ended up being a dispute over whether or not PageRank should be a factor.

Despite all its hatred...I am going to suggest it as a factor you should at least consider. I only say this after reading Eric Enge's extensive interview with Matt Cutt's (read this if you haven't) last week where they discussed PageRank throughout the whole thing and how it actually has a large affect on crawlers. Granted, most of it is about crawl rate..redirects..etc, but read for yourself and decide.