When trying to build backlinks to your website, there are several things you want to consider about the pages that are linking to you. Many people make the mistake of just focusing on PageRank, but there are several other factors that make a backlink better or worse for your page.

• Anchor text of link- This is very important with Google and can make a huge difference in your rankings for certain keywords or phrases. All the anchor text refers to is the actual text that is used in the link to your site. Being able to control the anchor text is what makes services like Linkvana so valuable.
• Frequency of change of anchor text- Google does not like to see your link’s anchor text change often. This isn’t a big problem for most people, but just try not to change your information in web directories and the like too often.
• Age of link- Generally speaking, the older the link to your site, the better. If you are able to get a permanent link on the homepage for a website, it will be much more valueable than a link that Google pick’s up and is gone two weeks later. Common sense right?
• Number of outgoing links on the referring page- The lower the number of outgoing links there are  on the referring page, the more important Google considers your link to be. This is often a downfall of directory links and “links pages” on websites. If you are just one of 30 links on a page, Google won’t consider that anything special.
• On-the-page factors of the referring page- Google looks at the keyword density, title, and other on the page factors of the site that is referring to yours.
• Theme of referring page- You want the website theme of the referring page to be related or similar to your general theme. Having  links on completely unrelated sites won’t do much good.
• Expert sites- Google considers some websites to be “Expert” sites for certain topics. It isn’t known exactly which sites these are or what the criteria is, but getting a link from an expert site is a huge boost!
• Finally, PageRank- The higher the PageRank of the referring site, the better it will make the link. PageRank considers several of the factors listed above already.

So, there you have it. My experience has been that any link from a related and non-spam site will be beneficial to your page, but getting links based on the above factors will really maximize the power of the link. SEOmoz has some really cool tools on their website that can help you to estimate how strong a link from a given website would be and can even provide a list of the best sites to try and get links from.

Tags: backlinks, building backlinks, google, seo, seomoz