Inbound Link Attribute Ranking Influences

Score

Anchor Text

4.4

The key phrase used as the linking text - although this seems to be of less importance than in years gone by, the anchor text and the text adjacent to the link are still the most influential attributes of an inbound link.

Global Link Popularity

3.6

The link popularity of the site that is linking to your web page - the better the site linking to yours, the better the link will be.

Subject Relevance of the Linking Page

3.5

Is the page that is linking to your website about the same subject matter - although subject relevance is not a measure of authority, I do believe that subject relevance is advantages.

Link Popularity within Niche

3.4

The link popularity of a site within its niche, how the niche community sees the site - links from authority websites in your niche will help you rank better than links from non authority sites in your niche.

Link Age

3.2

The actual age of the link to your website - like good wine, links mature with age, Google prefers links that are at least 4 months old.

Subject Relevance of the Linking Site

3.1

Is the website that is linking to your website about the same subject matter  - this one is an advantage, although not critical.

Adjacent Text

3.0

That part of the link that is not anchor text - this is gaining in importance in web search and is being used effectively with Google's image search.

Internal Link Popularity of the Inbound Linking Page

2.8

How many other pages on the host website are linked to the page that links to your website  - once a website has gained trust, this is very useful, prior to gaining trust, this can be a negative influence.

Temporal Link Attributes

2.5

When was the link created and last updated - at this stage, while I think that the link age is influential, I don't think that link update plays much of a role, probably will in the future, much like content updates does.

Domain Extension of the Website linking to you

2.4

.com, .edu, .gov, .net, etc - theoretically this should not influence ranking, but links from .gov and .edu are of particular value as they are trusted sites with lots of quality inbound links.

Google Page Rank of the Linking Page

2.3

The Google Toolbar Page Rank of the Linking Site  - PageRank is not that important, but from a linking point of view, Google uses this data to set crawl priorities and to determine whether the page should go into the general or supplemental index .