Evaluating Potenlial Link Partners for Mortgage Broker Websites
Upon what criteria do you base whether or not to exchange links with another mortgage broker or real estate website? Here is a list in no particular order of the things we factor into our evaluation:
1. Does the website have any PR? If not is it a new website (you can check the whois data for the domain to have an idea of when the site went up)?
2. Are the resource pages cached in Google? If not Ok for a brand new site, not a good sign for an older site.
3. Are the resource pages all within two clicks of the home page?
4. Does the site have the resource pages disallowed in a robots.txt file?
5. Are the links written in HTML (not java or a redirect script)?
6. Does the page have an expiration meta tag? If so the expired page has probabley been droped for the engines.
7. Is your link back from a sub domain? Sub domains are recognized by a period in the middle of the domain name for example if I own the domain mortgages.com I could setup a sub domain called refinance.mortgages.com. Sub domains are much like a real domain except they aren't. They point to a folder on the main domain and are not highly regarded by the search engines the way a domain is. We avoid linking with subdomains. You need to be careful as you may be offered a link back from a subdomain and requested to link to the primary domain, we avoid these as well.
8. Are there less than 100 links per page? More than 100 links per page will dilute the value so much that we don't bother linking.
9. Does the potential partner list links using the proper anchor text and descriptions?
10. Are links listed along side the description, not in a table with the anchor in one cell and the description in another? Remember that the sequence of words and proximity is important.
11. Does the potential partner segregate their links by topic? By Geographic region? A link from a page about mortgage websites in your town or state should be considered more valuable than a link from a page listing any and all kinds of websites.
We'll add to this list in the future. If you have something we missed please let us know!
Last edited by oppenheimer : 03-13-2006 at 02:31 PM.
|