Judging the value of a link trade
 

If you're trading links for SEO -- how do you judge a "good" link, let alone a fair trade? I mean in these days when PR means nothing, and Alexa is meaningless there don't seem to be too many options.

Here's what I do:

I'll take a look using seodigger.com (premium account to show deep urls) to see if a potential link trade is ranking for a) my keywords, b) related terms or at least c) something rather than nothing.

Then I'll take a look at Alexa + Quantize + compete to get a traffic estimate -- if they have enough traffic to get detailed stats on quantize or compete I'll take that into consideration as well. It's rough but better than nothing I figure. I know I said this is for SEO not traffic, but they way I see it if they are not loved by the SE then they don't get no traffic.

So how do you look at it?


Hony

1) Do I know or can I qualify how much I can trust the person.
2) Am I linking to relevant content.

I don't put much stock in third party analysis.