Powerful Link: Do You Have It?

While links are obviously important for your search rankings, it’s also the power of your links. Analyzing your link profile, do you have it, a powerful link?

What is Link Profiling?

Link profiling is the practice of analyzing the amount and power of the links for your site. Doesn’t sound too complex right? If you don’t really know what you are looking for it can be an arduous process. Thankfully, geniuses of seo and link building, seomoz, have done the hard work for you.

Using Open Site Explorer, they have given us the ability to deeply analyze our link profile and classify them by page and domain authority. When you look closely at your link profile, do you see powerful links or a massive amount of low page authority links? In order to fully optimize your site, you need to be aware of your link building campaign and more importantly if your campaign is working.

What Do You Mean Page Authority?

Since I like to give people the basics, I will keep this as simple as possible. Mainly because there are blogs out there that can give you more in depth analytical information if that is what you need. So, the basic premise is this: when a page links to you, the authority of that page is measured by it’s pagerank, relevance and number of outgoing links. Generally, you would not want an unranked page with 100 outgoing links about porn linking to you from that page. ( unless you’re into that kinda thing!)

Page Relevance

I probably don’t even need to go over this with you, but I will anyways…because I want to! When a page links to you, it should be on topic. I don’t want a shoe warehouse site linking to my blog page about traffic generation. Makes perfect sense.

And the same goes for your outbound links as well. Keep them as on topic as possible. A natural link building campaign will include some random off topic links in your commenting efforts, but keep this to a minimum. When you link on your pages, search engines will use your links to figure out what the heck your post/page is all about.

If you are discussing duck feeding habits and you link to a dress making shop, you’ve just crushed your relevancy and the search engines have no idea what your talking about. Don’t make it any harder on yourself by confusing them for crying out loud.

How Do I Check My Link Profile?

We have all checked who is linking to us by using Yahoo! site search. However, the most in depth results I have ever seen are by using seomoz’s link profile tool.  With over 84,000 readers, I think it’s safe to say, they know what they are talking about.

So give it a whirl…check your link profile and see if you have powerful links. You can easily download their spreadsheet and import your data. Analyze your link profile results each month to see if your efforts are paying off.

Let’s hear it…how do you analyze your links? What’s more important to you, page authority or relevance?