Find PageRank, Outbound Links, and Links to HTML Ratio

Quality backlinks, or inbound links, to your website is vital to achieving high search engine rankings. Backlinks are the “votes” your site is getting that tells the search engine spiders how popular and important your site is. This factor is considered highly in search engine ranking algorithms. The number or quanitity of backlinks is considered much less importantly due to the number of sites that have employed the use of spamming and link farms. Backlinks coming from such sites can actually result in being penalized by the search engines and having your site ignored by them

The free  Link Appeal tool from webmaster toolkit is a unique tool. You can enter the URL of a site you are considering asking for a backlink from to determine if it’s a quality, or recommended site. It uses factors such as PageRank, the number of outbound links on the site, and the percentage of links to HTML. The results will give the site a rank on a scale of ten to help you determine if this is a site you want a link from.