Verifying Inbound & Outbound BacklinksPosted on September 27, 2010 in category » Selling Websites



If you’re looking to sell your website, than optimizing your site for key word density and content is key. However, if you’re thinking about purchasing a website at SecondWind Marketplace, you may want to do a little due diligence and look for a site with a number of well established inbound and outbound links. Typically these sites have been around a little longer than a newly established site and provide a move value, but this should be a crucial step before making the leap to website ownership.

You would think having a number of inbound links to your site would be better, right? Well, sort of. You could literally spend at eternity getting a million incoming links that only counted for .001% towards your websites ranking, however links coming from other pages that already have a number of  inbound links or are completely irrelevant to your site’s content really do not count very much towards your sites overall search engine ranking.

If you’re looking to create the best quality links, we recommend links from a page or domain that:

1. Are highly related to your content.
2. Have few outbound links.
3. Have a high Google PageRank (we’ll talk about this in a minute)
4. Is from an authority and a quality site in your industry.

Now, before you think about adding a comment, pages having a high number of outbound links but have content highly related to your site, such as directories can still have a positive effect on your popularity.

Therefore, you will still want to spend your time acquiring quality inbound links. There are several ways you can do this:

  • Create a terrific site with great content – other sites will naturally link to you.
  • Request links from other related sites.
  • Establish relationships with other people in your industry (suppliers, wholesale retailers, industry certification sources, etc.) and ask for links back from their site.
  • Actively participate in forums – After all, meeting new people virtually and making more friends can’t hurt!
  • Write industry related articles (like this one) and allow other people to backlink.
  • Write press releases and distribute them freely or through a paid press release service that will distribute your news and links across the web. We recommend 1888pressrelease.com.

    Your outbound links should link to quality, authoritative sites.  Always link outward when appropriate and choose wisely using keywords in your anchor text. If you have a page about car insurance prices, and another on the car insurance policies and another on the car insurance resources, link between them and within your content using your keywords in your anchor text. This not only helps people visiting your site, but helps search engines see “quality groupings” of related content.Keep in mind search engines care who you link to, and they do assume that “like minds think alike.” So just don’t link to anyone, and don’t swap links with just anyone who asks.

    Now, as a seller what tools can use to verify the information before listing your site on SecondWind Marketplace? Well, there a number resources you can use, we recommend checking out the following:

    Yahoo! Site Explorer

    Yahoo! Site Explorer is a great tool to check out the number of inbound links to your site. However, before you do so you will need to create a Yahoo! Account and upload a verification key or by adding a META tag to your homepage. Once this is completed just click on the Explore button to view the results.

    SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer

    SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer is a link popularity and Backlink verification tool. To use the tool, visit the site and just type the page’s address and hit Get Link Data. The site will display a number od information tabs including page authority, domain authority, link root domains and total links.

    There are two things to love about this option. First, the person can compare the site’s links with others, especially to those of potential competitors. As a seller, this may give you some insight into page rank and traffic. Second, there’s no need to register.

    However, the free version of SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer will only generate a record of 1,000 links. If you wish to gather a more extensive list, upgrade the membership to Pro for only $99/month.

    Google Webmaster Tool

    As previously mentioned Google has an excellent backlink checker and is a little more robust and. This tool is even available with the Google Toolbar. After creating an account, Google’s Webmaster Tool can analyze search data, check inbound and outbound links and even tell if there are errors with your sitemap. All of these features (and more) make optimizing you site much easier.

    • Erik
    View all posts by Erik
    SecondWind Marketplace

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    3 Comments on “Verifying Inbound & Outbound Backlinks”

    1. Nile on Nov-17-2010

      Some of the directories out there require a fee. If it has great stats (meaning you do need to do a little research to make sure of this), then invest. It is worth having your site listed on a directory with amazing pull.

      However, linking with influential people in your niche will also work too. And encouraging your readers to link to you, social network your article like mad, and getting out to comment are all great helps.

    2. Betsy on Dec-06-2010

      Ooh I didn’t know about that 1888pressrelease.com that’s a good one!

    3. Jay J. on Dec-06-2010

      great article, that Google webmaster tool is a powerful beast!