Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s now look deeper into each criterion of this checklist.<\/p>\n
The site\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s overall look and feel – very often, this will be the only thing you will look at. Think of spam sites (a.k.a. built for AdSense\/insert any other ad network here) – you will probably make your judgement as soon as you see the site – but not all sites are so easy to evaluate.<\/p>\n
The site\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s top level domain – .edu\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s are the best out there of course, and .gov are also very good. Country-specific domains might be of importance to you as well if you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re targeting something local\/non-English speaking audience.<\/p>\n
Site age – you know Google loves old sites, so the older the better. I use either a whois option in Firefox SearchStatus plugin or whois.sc<\/a> which gives you a lot of information about a domain. You might also want to pay attention to the period of time the domain is registered for – the longer the better.<\/p>\n Google PageRank – ok even if you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe it matters much any more, you still want to look at it. If you see a grey bar instead of any pagerank it might mean the site is not indexed\/banned by Google – so that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s a sign you need to dig deeper to find out why it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s grey.<\/p>\n Number of pages indexed by the main search engines – this will give you an idea of a site\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s level of exposure in the search engines, and also if there are any problems with the site. If a site is thousands of pages and you only see a few indexed – and the age of the site suggests it hasn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been launched just now – beware of possible deindexing going on.<\/p>\n The quality of indexed pages listing – are there any supplemental results?<\/p>\n Number and quality of backlinks Yahoo shows for the site – ok you may want to check Google\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s backlinks for the site as well but Yahoo shows more (however, there are ways to get Google to show you more backlinks it knows about than it intends to<\/a> The site\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s history in Web Archive<\/a> – this is especially helpful if there are problems with the site and you want to see whetehr there has been something on the site earlier that could get it banned.<\/p>\n The site\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s traffic estimation – I use Alexa for this. Although Alexa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s data is not particularly accurate and is prone to manipulations, it can still provide you with an estimate of the overall tendency (e.g. if the site traffic is increasing over time or vice versa).<\/p>\n The important rule, however, is not to base your judgement solely on one of these criteria. Use all the data you obtained when making a decision about a site\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s quality.<\/p>\n This is the checklist for any type of sites. Now, if we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re evaluating a directory, there are some additional criteria that can be considered:<\/p>\n If you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re evaluating a blog, there are some more blog-specific things to consider:<\/p>\n When making an estimate of a blog, mix these criteria in with our usi\\ual checklist and you\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re sure to dig some valuable data. But even if a blog\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s current traffic and following is insignificant, the author might still be active enough to be able to become a new A-lister tomorrow – so maybe it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s worth it to make friends with that blogger Other people\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s posts related to this topic:<\/p>\n Todd Malicoat\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s post on figuring a site value when buying\/selling sites<\/a> A Librarian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust<\/a> \u00e2\u20ac\u201c from Google\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Newsletter for Librarians Be sure to catch the next part of this series where we will talk of link value.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When running a link building campaign, you want to make sure the sites you get the links from (be it through directory submission, or link exchange, or buying links, or even links obtained through linkbait \/ viral marketing efforts) are good quality sites. Links evaluation will be covered in part 2 of this mini-series, now […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.irishwonder.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\";-)\"](\"file:\/\/\/F:\/BH\/irishwonder.com\/irishwonder%20blog%20cache\/irishwonder.com_blog_2006_03_files\/icon_wink.gif\"){kind=icon}
) Keep in mind that link: search in Yahoo might not show you all you need to see and you might also want to do a linkdomain: search.<\/p>\n\n
\n
<\/p>\n
\nShoeMoney\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s podcast on directories<\/a><\/p>\n
\nSuggested reading:<\/a><\/p>\n
\nPurdue University tutorial on Site Evaluation<\/a>
\nGoogle\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Spam recognition Guide for Raters<\/a> (a Word document, provided by Henk van Ess)<\/p>\n