How to identify valuable back links?

Back links — links that lead to a website or page — are a very important resource for search engine optimization professionals. In addition to leading visitors to a website, they also assist search engines to measure the quality and authority of a particular page, which in turn determines the pages to be displayed for particular keywords and the order in which they are displayed, on search engine result pages.
As a SEO professional, you must have always heard that good quality back links is very important for increasing the page rank of a website. While I started out my career as a greenhorn in professional SEO services India, I often used to wonder how one defines good quality back link. Is it just a link from a site having loads of page rank, and one which is relevant to my site? How can we determine a valuable or a good quality link? Without having a clear view on this topic, going for link building is just shooting in the darkness. Building links without having the idea about the link value may lead to your website getting stuck up amongst spammy back links, and you will be wasting your time and money building links with sites which are low quality sites in the eyes of search engines. In this discussion, we will dwell on the most important topic—that of identifying whether a site we are trying to gain a link from is valuable or not.

1) Lots of advertizing content: If the site is covered with lots of AdSense, keyword text links or other advertising content, links from such sites should be avoided.

2) Content quality: If the language of a site is not well written, or the site is not designed as per the best practices of on-page and off-page SEO, then the site is most probably maintained by inexperienced hands, and is not worth getting links from.


3) Low traffic website: Check the back links of the site or blog you are looking to get a link from. A website having little or no back links attracts little or no traffic, due to which links from such sites won’t be treated as valuable.

4) Lack of moderation: Blog comments and business directories which encourage spammy links are likely to be banned by search engines sooner or later. Avoid them if you don’t want to be branded as spam along with them and get removed from indexing.