Search Optimization SEO

How to Tell if a Link Will Have a Strong Effect on Your SERPS

It is a useful skill to be able to look at a web page and get some feel for how effective a link from that page will be in raising your search engine position There are a number of well known factors to look at here, including the pages page rank, the number of backlinks to the page and to the site it is on as well as how related the page is to your niche. There is one factor however that I believe is more important than those considerations: essentially how well does the page itself rank in the search engines.

A page that ranks well for reasonable terms means that it has some respect from the search engines that may go above the basic measures normally adopted. If you think about it, there are probably over 100 factors in these search algorithms that contribute to how well a page ranks. Looking at metrics such as PR and the number of backlinks only gives a small view into what may be giving strength, but if a page actually ranks well itself, this means that when all the hidden factors are taken into account, the search engines are deciding to trust this page. Therefore, if they link to you, I think you are more likely to earn respect from the search engines, than if a higher PR page that doesn’t rank well was to link to you.

In order to see how well the page ranks, I use a site known as SEODigger.com. This site stores a large database of web pages and the terms these web pages rank in the top 20 for. Simply put the URL of the page you are looking at into SEO Digger to get a feel for how well the page is ranking.

This concept can then be integrated with the notion that links are more effective if they are from pages that relate to your niche. Let’s expand that concept to say there will be additional benefit if the keywords that the page ranks for are related to the keywords you are attempting to target.

I think a lot of people get too hung up on PR when looking at links. It’s not all about PR. I’ve seen a PR3 page rank in the top 10 for the term “SEO”. I will bet that a link from that page will be somewhat more effective than your average PR4.