During the course of owning a website you are going to receive link requests from other webmasters.
That is unless you have someone like us managing all back-end aspects of your website for you, however you still need to understand how to evaluate these requests.
What this post will do is help you evaluate link requests so that you are getting the most benefit for your business.
Getting The Best Value From Link Requests
Firstly make sure that the link request is coming from a website with good reputation and that has some similarity to yours and in fact will benefit your readers if you decide to give a link to the requesting site, you can read about quality back links here.
This will give both sites a benefit in Google and could even start to see your site as an authority in its selected niche market. You also need to make sure that any link you receive is “DoFollow” so that you are getting not only page-rank passed to your linked page but search engines following the link back to your site.
Make Sure The Page Rank Is Equal Or Higher Than Your Site
Next, if the link request you receive is coming from anything under a page rank 2 website look long and hard at that site to determine whether or not it is something you would find appealing, because if you don’t then the chances are most visitors will leave the site as soon as they arrive making it a low quality site in the eyes of Google.
Make sure the site has all the appropriate legal pages such as a contact us page, privacy, disclaimer and site map page at a minimum. The first indication of a site that is nothing more than a link farm is a site that has none of these elements. You might also spend a minute or two of your time checking other pages of the requesting site to make sure it is only writing about niche related topics and not a wide range of topics, this is another indication of a link farm.
If all the above steps are in place the next thing you need to know is where your link is going to be placed, we strongly recommend you do not take up any link offers that are on link pages. Link pages are nothing more than a page that has been created to place links to other sites and they are rarely visited and will give your site very little value if any.
Where You Need To Have Your Links Placed On The Reciprocal Site
The best place for your link is what is called “In Content“, this means there is an article or post on the website that is requesting the link that is relevant to your site and where you can easily place a contextual link. These types of links whether reciprocal or not are the best links you can get and should be the only links you are willing to consider.
Make Sure The Site Is Using Some Form Of Internal Linking
You will also need to see how the site is doing its own internal linking, if the article you are getting a back link from is not being linked to internally then there is no real benefit to your website. In the early days many sites would request and link exchange and offer you a place on their links page. however if you look closely at the site more often than not you will find they do not actually internally link to that page anywhere on their site making this a win for them and a complete waste of time for you with getting a link to your site.
Checking The Cache Age Of The Site
Lastly, you need to know how often the site is being updated and cached by Google, do this by using this command in your browser – http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.marketingtilt.com.au (make sure you change the last URL from our URL to the page you want to find) this will give you an indication of how often the site is being updated with content especially if it’s a static HTML site with no dates or publish dates being shown.
Getting The Back Links Found
The last suggestion is something we use on all link requests and it is not discussed very much online. Once your new link has been placed you then need to use your social networks to give it some exposure, yes I know you are thinking that it’s another website and that webmaster should do it but your link also needs to be found and if the content was good enough for you to add a link to then it should be good enough for you to share across your social networks.
A really quick and easy way to do this is by using a service called JustRetweet, you simply add that page with your back link into the system and allocate some credits so that it can be Tweeted, FB liked and shared on Google+ all on autopilot.
Important: you should create an Excel Spreadsheet for any links you are creating as well as where you placed that link on your own website so you can always refer back to the linked page to ensure firstly that the link is still in place and secondly that it is “DoFollow”. Unfortunately there are some unscrupulous webmasters that will offer you a to good to refuse link only to remove the back link a few weeks later.
