Importance of Quality in Backlinks

Backlinks, or inbound links, play a significant role in how the search engines rank your site. Though the number of backlinks is important, more importantly is the quality of those links. The search engines rank the links on relevance, i.e. sites linking to yours that have similar content, and the importance or ranking of those sites. The more popular relevant sites that link to you, the higher those links are regarded. The anchor text used for those links is believed to play a high role in the search engine algorithms as well. Anchor text that contains your primary keywords will have greater meaning and importance.

How Does Link Harvester Calculate Backlink Quality?

SEO Book offers a free, open source Link Harvester tool will display your unique linking domains and their IP addresses. It includes link information from .gov, .edu, .mil, and .ac.uk domains that likely rate higher in authority algorithms. It queries the Yahoo database and will bold domains that link from 5 or more pages. It also links to WhoIs Source, Internet Archives and Google cache. You can save the information to .cvs.

The backlink quality tool will separate results by authority type of domains.

Being open source, you can download and host your own copy of Link Harvest on your site.