How Do I Calculate the Value of an Inbound Link?

High Quality Inbound Links are a very important part of your SEO campaign but what criteria is involved in determining the value of an inbound link? While there are several factors that go into determining the value of an inbound link to your website, let's first look at Page Rank and how it impacts the value of a backlink.

Named after one of Google's founders, PageRank is an algorithm used by Google that conducts analysis on inbound links. The analysis algorithm defines a weight to an element in a hyper linked set of documents, such as your website. The weight that is assigned is referred to as PageRank.

The Google PageRank algorithm is proprietary and owned by Google. No one except Google knows the specifics of the algorithm but based on research, one can decipher the importance of acquiring high quality backlinks for their website. Each link serves as a "vote" or "referral" for the content of the webpage being linked to. If you have backlinks from a site the offers no value to an end user, the acquired link doesn't pass the "link juice" or "weight" to increase your PageRank.

Now that we've established what PageRank is and how it works, we can move on to how you can determine the value of a link to your site.With each referring backlink, "PR Weight" is passed from the link. The PR Weight is determined by the value of the page that hosts the link to your site, divided by the number of outbound links on that page, minus 15%.

Let's look at an example of how to determine the value of an inbound link and how it will increase your PageRank.

Your website is currently a PR2.
You acquire a backlink from a PR4 page with 25 outbound links.
The PR4 site carries a weight of 625/26 outbound links (including yours)=24.03. Now minus 15%=20.43. The value of the inbound link passes a 20.43 PR Weight to your page.
Your page is a PR2 which is equal to 25. Including the PR Weight passed to your page by your newest link, the total PR Weight is 45.43. Since the PR Weight of a PR3 page is 125, you are in need of more valuable inbound links to achieve the next level of PR3.
In addition to PR Weight, there are several additional factors you must consider when evaluating the value of a backlink to your site.

The referring webpage content should be relevant or similar to yours. A link from a site or page with irrelevant content, does not pass the same PR Weight as does a link from relevant content.

Natural Links
Contrary to popular belief, links from PR0 sites can improve your search ranking. For your link building campaign to look natural, you should have links coming from sites where PageRank varies from PR0 to PR4 or higher. If more than 5% of your inbound links are PR4 or higher, it arouses suspicion.

To summarize, the value of an inbound link is determined by the PR Weight that it passes to your webpage. The PR Weight is determined by the relevance it has to your content and the number of outbound links the referring webpage already has in existence.

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