Not all links are created equal. Do you know what to look for?

• My company has directed me to be the lead for a large in-house link building campaign. My main problem right now is correctly evaluating the links I'm finding. Can you assist me with a checklist or a tool suite I can use to determine which links are the good ones?

Answer: We are going to preface this answer with the blanket disclaimer that no two links are created equal. Worse, no two competitors or competitive niches are created equally either. Add that to the accepted fact that one link can affect a site algorithmically in a completely different way than another and you start to see why the answer..."it depends" is so common in SEO circles.

Further, link evaluation is all about time allotment and prioritization. You only have so much time to review each possible link and determine the good, authority links from the bad. This is complicated when you realize that link-affecting factors can arise: at the domain level, the page level, and with the structure of the link itself.

Nevertheless, based on our own years of experience as link builders and the countless hours of trial and error, we've put into our own sites and those of our clients we do have some tips to impart when correctly evaluating links.

First, use the right tools. We recommend the combination of all or several of the following when researching pages/sites for possible link placements:

• 1. SEOQuake for Firefox: Firefox is a great browser built for SEO research, mostly because it can be enhanced with robust add-ons that make link and site evaluation a snap. We recommend SEO Quake to get a quick look at such metrics as the page's PageRank, cache date in Google, inbound link metrics, and other on-page info.
  
  
• 2.