Useless Link Detector:
Is it useful?

Do you want to know if Google “ignores” the link juice in links you give or get? Now text link center tells us their online ‘useless’ link detector will let you know. I’ve evaluated it. I think it’s imperfect, but I also think it’s a useful learning tool for bloggers who are trying to improve their SEO by getting links.

Does this detect “useless” links?

Who knows? Text Link Center is not Google nor any kind of search engine; their algorithm doesn’t “count”. But, I can say that running the tool did give me a few insights to some “symptoms” that a link might suspect. I’d been aware of a few of those but I had missed out on one.

What “useless link symptoms” does TextLink Center’s tool detect?

The “symptoms” of uselessness — if useless is defined as a link that is worth purchasing for link juice. Symptoms I was already aware of include:

1. Link in header. Reality: It probably is useless to buy a link in a header for link juice.

   Bloggers frequently place navigational or promotional links in the header; in most cases these are internal links.

   These are rarely editorial. It would make sense if search engines assumed these weren’t ‘editorial’ in any real sense. But, the engines also likely know they are not “nefarious”.

2. Link in footer. Reality: It probably is useless to buy a link in a footer for link juice.

   Links in footer are very often ads. That said Problogger now places category and resource links in the footer. This leaves his sidebar free for other stuff.

3. Link in sidebars. Reality: It’s probably risky, though not useless, to buy “link juice” in a sidebar but it may be a good place to buy traffic or just help your new site get crawled.

   As indicators of “editorial quality”, links in sidebars are ambiguous. The difficulty for a search engine is that on niche blogs blog rolls often are highly editorial. In some niches (like knitting) they are the main mechanism for indicating value. Treating all sidebar links as “useless” would degrade a ranking algorithm.

   I’d guess search engine algo’s probably look for additional signs to decide. I’d look for collections of links to unrelated places or image links. For example, a series of links to non-knitting resources like “mortages” and “vacation homes” on a knitting blog would be suggest that the blog is selling links. Let’s face it, the little square images we often see in sidebars are often ads.

The symptom I’d not considered: densely packed links.

Text Link Center’s “Useless Link Detector!” thought 6 of the nine links inside my post Five Ways Google Should Know My Posts Do NOT Contain Paid Links are “useless”. Which? In the quote below, I’d linked to seven blogs, the ones highlighted in red were flagged as “useless”, the one in blue was flagged as “useful”.

…If I link to Sebastian , Sephy, WebGrrrl, Steve Cronin, Untwisted Vortex, Blog-op, Great Video Clips and Re-emergence, I may have linked for no other reason than because they appear in my Bumpzee widget, but you can be sure they didn’t pay me. (Meanwhile, as I write, I noticed Slevi stopped by.)

The two links in the top paragraph were also “useful”.

What feature “useless” links share? They fall in a pattern a list like this link, link, link and link. That is: there are a whole bunch of links separated by very little text.

To do a further test of Text Link Center’s tool, I ran it on my sock link page. This page is full of links, but each is separated by about 1 sentence worth of text. TLC’s tool thinks those are useful.

TLC is sort of correct. In my recent post at Big Buck’s Blogger, the six “useless” links were selected purely because those visitors had visited my blog recently. Mind you, I do like those blogs- but I included those links in that post for the reason just given. The links on my sock links page, those posts were selected because they are good sock resources!

So, maybe links in a row are a symptom of non-editorial links. Haven’t we all seen these viral link chains: *, *, * *.

But the real question one might ask: Does Google assume a bunch of links in a row are useless? My guess is that Google thinks it’s a coin toss and looks for other symptoms. After all, links all in a row are commonly used when bloggers are discussing recent kerfuffles in the blogosphere; the links included are often to very authoritative sites.

Now, a test to see what the detector thinks of link I think smell of “paid”.

To do a further test, I visited the page with the link to “mailboxes” on a blog that runs “PayU2Blog” where I saw text like this:

Because then, when I go buy that child food, and she can’t eat it, I won’t be forced to make a second trip to the ER in the same night. And the mail boxes of the insurance company won’t be stuffed with mail about the TWO ER visits in one night.

I don’t know if the link in that section is paid, but I am puzzled by “mail boxes” which was hyperlinked. After all, why would someone insert link such a word? The blog shows a PayU2Blog logo; their TOS let permit the blogger to discuss anything at all as long as the correct word is linked. So, it smells of paid to me- a human.

Text Link Center’s “Useless Link Detector” thinks “mail boxes” passes link juice.

Is the link paid? Does the link pass juice? We don’t know. But I think this link is more suspicious than any on any of my pages.

So, is TLC’s Useless Link Detector useful?

I think the detector is probably useful as a learning tool, but I would not rely on it to detect “uselessness”. It’s clearly poor at detecting paid links, but it’s ok at revealing some suspicious symptoms.

Having used the tool, I’ll continue to scoff at link trains with links like this: *, *, * *.

When possible, I’m going to avoid listing interesting blog in lists that look like this: link, link, link and link. I’ll still link that way when it’s difficult to avoid; if that means some of my editorial links don’t pass juice, so be it.

Tips if you buy links.

If you buy links and want link juice, I’d also suggest you avoid buying links in headers, sidebars or footers. However, those may be good places for traffic. For link juice, you probably want to buy in content.

Will buying a link in content be enough to ensure a link passes juice? Honestly, I doubt it.

A link buyer might want to look at the blog overall. If you see loads of fairly short posts with links to only 1 unique domain, can’t identify a niche, see lots of ads in the sidebar, and think the choice of links seems rather odd, I’d avoid that blog.

Text Link Center’s tool won’t detect the the paid links in these blogs, but I’ll bet you dollars to donuts Google does!