Do Outbound Links Matter Anymore?
People used to purchase link text ads based on the website PageRank (PR), the number of outbound links on that page was very important to them.
The reason for this was that the available PageRank a web page has to vote is voted evenly to all pages. The internal pages for the most part vote the PR back so those are not considered.
Now that PageRank is held by most SEO experts to have little or no ranking weight, I am asked from time to time by clients if this is an issue of the past.
When you are purchasing text link ads one of your main concerns should be click thought traffic. With this in mind it only makes sense that all other things being equal a page that has 20 links will give you more click though than a page that has 100 links.
Last month I blogged on SEO Tools That Analyze the Value of a Text Link Ad and I gave a list of 13 items that determines the value of a link. Here is the list again for your viewing convenience.
What make a link valuable?
1. Inbound site traffic and page traffic.
2. Inbound dot gov and dot edu links.
3. Click though traffic you get from the page.
4. Site in DMOZ and Yahoo directory.
5. Age of domain and time of domain being used (longer the better).
6. Inbound links shown to that page on Yahoo (link:http:www.domain.ext/page.html).
7. Ranking of page for the keywords it is optimized for.
8. Relevance of theme of site and page to your site and page.
9. Alexa ranking (lower is better).
10. Deep link compared to home page links.
11. Location of link.
12. Length of allowed description text.
13. PR of page (still matters a bit).