A comprehensive checklist for choosing the best link partner

You are working on your off-page SEO and now you want to evaluate how you can choose the right website and business partner for the link building purpose. Read this guide and follow through the checklist to avoid any possible penalty from google for any spammy backlinks.

If inbound links occur naturally, then you normally don’t need to check or evaluate them as it is your content that is being linked organically however some of the businesses focus on keywords ranking and traffic through organic channels. This is usually done by link-building tactics and if the website has a good standing then it can benefit the linked website immensely.

Below is the checklist of the factors that you should consider before choosing the link partner for your business:

1. Website Index status on search engines:
   It is very important to check if the website and its content pages are indexed on the search engines. You may choose to work on any search engine however as a best practice, it is essential that you check the index status of the website on google. If it is not indexed, then no need to move further. The link partner without indexation is either doing illegal business or recently created website. In either of the cases, it is useless to get the backlink from such website.
2. Webmaster Information:
   A genuine business or a website has all the relevant information about the webmaster or the business. Even having a contact form is not sufficient. If the business is doing everything legally then they would have contact information such as phone number, email address and address.
3. Content Quality:
   Content quality of any website plays a key role in engaging users. You don’t have to be grammar nazi or a professional writer to check the quality of the content. If a website has basic content issues then it is obvious that nobody would engage or share it hence making it useless and irrelevant for the linked partner.
4. Traffic Performance:
   It is important that website’s traffic is increasing gradually. Any major increase in traffic from known link farm websites could hurt the performance and keywords ranking of your website.
5. Selling Backlinks:
   There are huge number of websites who sell backlinks openly in the form of paid link programs. You need to avoid them as it can lead to direct penalty to the website.
6. Illegal Content / Information:
   Another important aspect of content is the use of illegal terms and industries such as porn, gambling, payday loads etc. Always do a quick search of the website using these terms and make sure there is nothing related to it present on the website.
7. Social Media Presence:
   While the object is to get the link from the link partner it is essential to observe the partner’s presence on social media and how it interacts with the fans / followers. If the partner’s social media pages have positive ratings and reviews then it means people tend to like what they are offering and that is a good sign for the business. However if a business has no or almost zero social media presence then it is obvious that nobody knows them. Avoid such link partners.
8. Guests Posts:
   Some websites offer mix of guest posts and have their own team of writers as well. If a website has content written by the guest authors only then it is a negative sign because you don’t want to put your link on a website with a paid-link on every second post. Avoid such websites.
9. Relevancy:
   With all the above factors, the key and most important factor is to determine if it will look natural and relevant for your business to have a backlink on the partner’s website? It is important to keep the relevancy factor in mind otherwise it will increase the bounce rate of your website when a user clicks on the link and doesn’t found relevant content.

All the above mentioned factors apply to every industry and will help you get a better understanding of how you should be choosing the right website for the backlinks purpose however feel free to modify this checklist as per your industry.