For qualifying a potential link partner, you obviously should look for the compatibility factor. Though, checking the site content need not be a full-fledged, thorough and time consuming exercise. Rather look for indications in the form of titles and the About page. Basic article titles and intros can inform you not only what the overall site is about, but also its tone and approach and whether the website matches your business profile.

Is the site or content relevant to you?

If still in doubt, take a quick look at its profile and history page. Carefully go through the mission statement. See if your content can fit in. But this is something to be taken up with help and advice of experts who will let you know if it’s all really worth the effort. In this context, an important aspect to finding out if a site will like to link up is to know if your venture or the site content that you’re pitching is of relevance to the domain of the site and the content that it currently hosts. You might come across one with high quality stuff. However, if it has little valuable metrics, it is better not to target or approach it right away.

Timeline is of essence

The meticulous timeline of relevant updates, the date on which the website pages – main landing or its inside content ones – have been last refreshed, is an important criterion. This gives us an idea that a site is attentive to producing text on regular basis, like blogs or news articles. If the latest news article or blog post on it is done about a month ago, it means the site has been poorly managed and neglected.

When to go for backlink analysis?

If you come across noticeable amount of linking root domains to the page, you may retain the same for further backlink analysis. Try and reach out to the sites, which link to that particular page and inform them they can have access to another good resource online for linking to instead.

Watch out for red flag keywords

Do not forget to take a quick glance at navigation/ footer links for clues, such as ‘write for us’, ‘guest posts’, ‘contributors’ etc. See if they’ve a page devoted to getting content already. Also, while browsing links, watch out for any red flag key terms, which resemble sponsored links with doubtful anchor text. Be wary of questionable words like loans, poker, Viagra etc. These are not desirable, so better stay away!

After having considered a majority of vital metrics, you will usually get a pretty good sense of whether or not you should approach the website. And if you are still in some doubt and still feel it’s of particular relevance and high value, as far as linking is concerned, you might resort to an outbound link checker so as to know if it is linking by any chance to questionable sites.

It is also not a bad idea to scan its backlink profile and see if all the crucial links coming in are mostly from directories or specifically pages titled as ‘Free Link Exchange’. Note here that design of a spam test can be a bit arbitrary since there are many sites run just for sake of it, and they make use of templates for some visibility online. So be careful while choosing your prospective link partners.