Unfortunately it’s not statistics! So it’s very difficult to implement that complex statistical formula and rank a “link”. Why would you need to get into this funny business of evaluating a link though? Did you do it ever while you used to just browse the net, email your friends, chat with them and send across some greetings - nope!
But the moment you entered into blogging or became webmaster, you came to know what value “link” has. How important it is to get a quality textlink for your blog or website. It’s good to gather thousands of them but the question is if they would really help your website. It’s important to have links across the web linking back to your website. Here text link quality takes priority over quantity. But if it’s not statistics, how would you measure quality of text link? Though it’s not possible to get a number for the quality of text link, you can still evaluate them on few parameters.
What are the parameters to evaluate text links?
First of all, find out since when the website or blog exists which is providing you a text link. You should prefer older domains here. [Don’t run behind young ones here at least ;-)]
Next parameter is like digging out someone’s history and reputation. You should find out who all are in this website’s neighborhood. How many unique domains are linking to this website where you would have your text link. This should be sufficient - you need not go into neighborhood details of the neighborhood websites. If the website that you are getting link from, has it’s link on .edu or .gov websites - you are good to go.
Next you shall check how many external indexable links [read Dofollow links] this page has. Lower number of outgoing links on the page, better to have text link on such pages. I have avoided offers of 3-way link exchange only because of this factor so many times.
Theme of the website that is linking to you: If it’s close to what niche your website is in, it’s better. But I personally think this factor should not matter much as long as the linking website is clean website. If my finance blog get a link from very high quality automobile blog, should not it help. It helps, but not same as getting link from a very high quality finance blog.
Now is it important to have link back from many pages [site wide]? Well, the answer is - it does not hurt. Most of the juice you receive from 10-15 quality pages is almost the maximum value out of all the site wide pages. Having site wide links on 100s of pages, should not hurt though.
Finally, how powerful the link is? Many years back, people could not find the power of the links so concept of page rank came into existence and now it’s widely used to decide the power of links vaguely. Remember, not all high page rank links are powerful to give a boost. You should always consider all the points being discussed here while deciding the power of the link.
Hope this small article helps you to decide the quality of text links while you get one next time.
Also read some interesting posts:
You have some good basics there, but you should link to a few of the places where we can do this research to find out some of these things.