There are two broad types of authorities to define links’ relevance – Absolute authority and relative authority. Sites such as Google’s blog and The Daily Beast can be classified as the absolute authority. These are also termed ‘informational’ authorities as against navigational authorities (DMOZ, for instance).

You also, on the other hand, come across relative authority sites run by webmasters or bloggers, established as authorities in a niche area. Bloggers like Mashable or Dooce are considered authorities in their respective domains. The link juice they will generate if they happen to link to you won’t be as high as that of an absolute authority site, but they still matter for their sheer dominance and credibility.

Weed out redundant links

Links have their own undefined life span that can vary from one site to another. Owners revamp the sites or remove webpages. When the links or sites themselves disappear, the links that point to them also become redundant. For instance, if one works through a webpage by publishers who link out quite a bit and the pages are gradually archived, you’re bound to come across dead links. You can solve this issue in two simple ways:

Make a list of dead links that you find and then approach the webmasters of these pages. Focus on one blog author/one resource and provide options for content rather than having to handle a host of them for each dead link, which  can become a logistical nightmare. Conversely, you may make use of a tool such as the W3C’s Link Checker for finding out dead links on a site or blog. It’s easy to do by following a few basic steps:

1.    Drop link into a relevant sub-form

2.    Choose your designated options

3.    Click ‘done’ and wait for a few seconds.

4.    You can check the status report

From the status report, you can create list of all the dead links, the webpages that need to be replaced and also the authors you are required to approach if it’s a multi-author resource.

Build a repository of quality link archive

A series of informative and insightful posts are a great way of getting links to your own site from them. This tactic typically will be easier to make work for relative authority content websites instead of absolute authority sites. However, if you’ve a proper guest posting strategy, which focuses on building quality links, traffic flow and optimum exposure on a select few relative authority websites, you will build a repository of solid content you can pitch even to the absolute authority sites.

There are authority sites like Huffington Post or Open Forum that need content for you to seek a post on them provided you boast a portfolio of instructive and meaningful posts for them to grasp the level of your expertise and writing skills that establish your credentials.