How do you decide the value of a text link? When either buying or selling links you need to have a rough idea of the value of that link.
Text ad value
Putting aside the factors such as how closely related the topic of the site is or the effectiveness of the ads copyrighting we want to know roughly how well an ad will perform.
The best metrics you can get are a sites actual stats, but these are only accessible to the site owner. The next best thing is to use publicly available metrics. Before I go on you need to be warned that some of the metrics I am going to mention can be misleading or even faked so you should take these metrics as an indicator not an absolute. That said these metrics are used by many major players in the net advertising arena.
RSS readership
Now not every site is going to have an RSS feed but it seems a growing number do making it an effective measurement of a sites readership base.
An RSS feed allows blog or site visitors to subscribe and get new posts delivered to their RSS reader without having to visit the publishers site. Bloglines provides an RSS readership widget which webmasters can use to show how many RSS subscribers.
Because Bloglines is a third party that measures the amount of readers a blog or site has it has become a valuable metric. A site with a high RSS subscriber base is likely to have a high level of traffic.
Technorati
Technorati provides 2 stats for blogs, authority and Rank. Authority is the number of sites linking to a blog on the last 6 months. Rank shows how popular a blog is, 1 being the highest a blog could rank. Top 1000 blogs tend to be popular high traffic blogs. So a blog with a high authority number and a low rank number menas the blog will have higher traffic.
To find out the rankings of a blog you need to visit the blogs Technorati page. The page for this blog would be http://technorati.com/blogs/www.textadsearch.com, to find the rank for another blog just replace textadsearch.com with the URL of the site.
Alexa
Alexa tracks visitors to sites form users who use their search toolbar installed. Whilst not considered a completely accurate indicator of traffic to a site I does give a general indication of a sites popularity. A site with a low Alexa rank shows a popular site, the higher the Alexa rank the less popular a site tends to be.
To view the Alexa ranking for a site just visit Alexa and search for the site. If the site is listed with Alexa then you will be able to view it’s rank.
Search engine stats
The Search engines, particularly Google, Yahoo and MSN(live) hold some useful information about sites. This information can be used as part of the picture to build up a stats profile for a site.
Each search engine indexes a number of pages for every site. The number of indexed pages for any given site can be a good indicator that that site is at least no banned by the search engines and at most shows the number of pages that could potentially generate traffic from the search engines.
You can also find the number of backlinks to a site usign the 3 main search engines. Backlinks are the number of links pointing to a site from other sites. The greater the number of backlinks tends to show a site is more popular.
The last few measurements are page rank given by Google to a site and Page strength developed by SEOmoz. Page rank tends to indicate the authority of a site, 10 being the highest. Page strength also gives a possible score out of 10.
Both of these metrics tend to encompass numerous other metrics to provide an easy to understand rating out of 10. Whilst these numbers cannot be completely relied on they can give an additional indication of a sites popularity.
Resources:
http://www.rankalert.net/siterank.php
http://www.domain-pop.com/results.php
