Link Quality at a Glance

Link Quality at a Glance is a free online link checker which gives you a quick indication of the quality of the outgoing links.

Link Quality in relation to SEO

Every link to your site might have a positive or negative influence on your position in the search engine results.

Positive

It is great when you get a link on a page which is in line with the content of your webpage. Of course all links at that webpage should work fine. It is preferred that the webpages linked to have qualitive useful content for your users.

Join your competitors

This means that it is better to have your link on a webpage that also links to your competitors than on a webpage where you are the only one.

Negative

Negative factors for the link quality are:

  1. links to only one domain
  2. broken links
  3. links to unsafe websites
  4. redirected links
  5. a lot of ads and affiliate links

Link Quality at a Glance checks the link quality in the following phases:

Phase 1

First things first. Link Quality at a Glance is testing the quality of the links in a background process. To view automatically the progress of the test your browser should support the automatic refresh option. This phase is used to check if the automatic refresh option is enabled.

Phase 2

In this phase the to be tested webpage is fetched. The duration of this phase depends on the time to load the webpage.

Phase 3

When the webpage is fetched, the links on the given webpage are analysed. A webpage could contain three types of links:

  1. Navigation links (the normal clickable hyperlink);
  2. Structure links (links to help the browser or searchengine to render or interpret the page correctly);
  3. Enrichment links (links to images and so on).

Only the normal clickable hyperlinks (the navigation links) are taken into account. There are three types of navigation links:

  1. Internal links;
  2. External links;
  3. Mailto and Javascript links.

In these phase the these link types are sorted and counted.

Phase 4

The internal links will be analysed superficial. This is because there might be a robots.txt file which might prevent Link Quality at a Glance to follow an internal link. To respect an eventual robots.txt file Link Quality at a Glance follows no internal link at all. However without following these links, it is still possible to count the number of:

  1. Unique links;
  2. Title attributes;
  3. No follow links;
  4. Target attributes;
  5. Download attributes.

Note that links belonging to the same second-level domain as the tested webpage are considered as internal links.

Phase 5

The same basic analysis for the internal links is also done for the external links. Due to the fact that external links have other characteristics as internal links, now also the following facts are collected:

  1. Secure (https) links;
  2. Links to a homepage;
  3. The number of different second-level domains.

Phase 6

In this phase stats are collected about the unique external links regarding:

  1. Broken or slow links;
  2. Redirected links;
  3. Safe links.

Final score

At the moment all results are available the stats collected and the tested unique external links are shown.

Note that the final score is based on the outbound links found at the tested page. The score depends on:

  1. How divers the site links;
  2. The percentage of broken links;
  3. The percentage of redirected links;
  4. The percentage of safe links;
  5. The number of external links.

Use your common sense

Note that Link Quality at a Glance isn't as smart as Google Penguin. So you should check for yourself if:

  1. The links are related to the subject of the webpage;
  2. The anchor texts of the links make sense;
  3. The title texts of the links make sense;
  4. The linked webpages are "high quality" webpages;
  5. All links you expected are available.

I hope you like Link Quality at a Glance,
Hans

Tip: Use a bookmarklet to get the link quality score even quicker.