Welcome to the third part of the mini text link buying guide (the guide for small link buyer, no seriously I’ve already done that joke and it wasn’t funny the first time). If you haven’t already done so check out part 1 and 2.
Link buying tools
In this instalment we will look at the tools you need to research sites to find out if they are a bargain or overpriced. These tools will provide you with data that will aid you in your decision of whether you will by a link on a particular site.
The first tool is Domain Pop backlink checker which allows you to find out how many links are pointing to a site from Google, Yahoo and MSN. I like this tool as you can also add pagerank information to the incoming backlinks.
An alternative to Domain pop is Rank alert’s backlink checker but in my opinion is not as good.
Next up is Smart Page Rank which allows you to find out the pagerank of any given website. The great thing about this tool is that it checks multiple data centres as well as..
This is a useful site as it gives you lots of information with just one search which is great for saving time if you have lots of sites to check.
Site indicators to consider
There are a number of metrics you can use to compare sites to help you decide which ones to buy text links with. These metrics can be researched without having to contact the webmaster but must be taken as comparative rather than absolute. The best stats you can get are the sites actual stats reported by the webmasters logging software or a third party tracker such as Statcounter.
Alexa
Alexa collects information from users who have installed their toolbar. I find it quite useful guide to find out how popular a site is. The higher the Alexa rank the fewer visitors a site tends to have. I say tend as this the most accurate guess you will get for a sites traffic.
Google being the largest search engine at this time provides useful guidelines to a site’s authority. You can tell this by the sites Pagerank, the number of indexed pages and the number of backlinks.
Again you need to know that pagerank is not absolute and many webmasters do not put much credence in this measurement. Google does not show all backlinks, so Yahoo is often a better measure for total backlinks.
Yahoo
Yahoo like Google will provide yuo with the number of pages indexed and th number of backlinks to a site. I like to think of Yahoo as a good backup for Google’s figures.
Lastly you can spend too much time on research and sometimes you just have to take a risk.
