Linkbuilding: Checklist for quality of a link

[akaigotchi]

Hi everyone,

During linkbuilding you often stumble upon those links you are not quite sure of. At first it may seem like a brilliant idea to get a link fom that site but on a second look it may be not.

So what would be a checklist of things to look for, if one is asessing a website's link quality? (e.g. how do you spot a bad neighborhood?)

If you are using SEOmoz tools for the quality asessment, which one would you use?

Looking forward to your answers! Thx for the help in advance!

Regards

Thorsten

[AdamThompson]

Thorsten,

That's a bit tough to answer quickly, because there are so many things that could negatively affect the trust or authority of a website. A few include:

Other websites the page/site links to

Usage or gray or black hat tactics

Quality of content on the site

Overall quality of the site

Authority of the linking page

[vforvinnie]

Some stuff I look for in a quality link:

Pagerank/MozRank

Other links on page - are there any pill/viagra or gambling/porn links?  Anything else fishy?  Skip it if so.  Are there more than 50-100 outbound links on the page?  That's a lot.

Google cache date - has it been cached within the last couple of weeks?  The more recent the better.

Is the site relevant to your niche?  What about the domain?  Does it look like a dropped site?  If so skip it.

How easy is it to get a link?  Do they automatically take reciprocals?

And like Adam said, how is the content?

All of these factors can help, but really it also comes down to your gut feeling.