Quantity & Quality of External Links

Having more external inbound links is something to be desired. If these links can be quality links with a lot of link juice, that’s even better. For best results, try to acquire inbound links from sites or pages with high PageRank values. As a rule of thumb, backlinks with a minimum PageRank value of 4 yield the best results.

As long as those links are not from link farms or other link schemes, you should be in good shape. The more backlinks you acquire from high-PageRank sites, the better. Backlinks say a lot about a website’s popularity. You can think of backlinks as votes for your link or URL. This is what search engines consider in their rankings as well.

The benefit is multifold, as you will be receiving traffic from your backlinks as well as from the search engines.

Speed of Backlink Accumulation:

How fast are you accumulating backlinks? This can become a negative ranking factor if your site is found to be using an unethical linking scheme.

If all your backlinks are using the same anchor text, search engines may view this as suspicious activity, which might trigger a manual inspection by the search engines and a delisting of your site. Let’s say your site had 20 backlinks yesterday, and today you suddenly have more than 100,000. Wouldn’t that look suspicious?

Topical Link Relevance:

It is important for backlinks to contain relevant anchor text. Here are some examples of good and bad anchor text:



The good examples use relevant text in the links. The bad examples, although they use the same destination URL, do not use relevant text. Ideally, the referring sites should also be talking about the same subject matter. At the very least, the referring page should be on the same topic.