How to Find the Best Internal Site Pages Based on PageRank and Backlinks

Link builders take many factors into account when determining the quality of a page on which they want to obtain a link. Some of these end goals for link building include, but aren’t limited to, PageRank, incoming links, and popularity.

The question is, how do you find that “Holy Grail” of pages within a large site, especially when it comes to blogs or large directories? Here’s a simple process using two free tools to find the best pages on a website to get your link.

1. Download SEOQuake for Firefox

This free plug-in will allow you to get valuable statistics on pages within Google search results, including incoming links and PageRank. Once installed, be sure to change the following settings under your Firefox menu > Tools SEOQuake > Preferences > SE plug-ins:

By selecting Load Parameters by request, you will prevent the plug-in from trying to pull all of the SEO information for search results every time you do a search. Having it pull this data every time usually slows your browser down when performing multiple searches, as well as heightens the chance of your IP getting temporarily banned by Google and Yahoo.

2. Advanced Search

Do an advanced search query in Google for [example.com site:example.com” and show 50-100 results per page. This query will bring back only pages on a particular domain.

Depending on the number of pages within the website, you may want to add additional details, such as a particular keyword to get more specific results, or use advanced queries like “intitle:keyword” to get only pages with a particular keyword in the title. Under the examples section, you’ll see some useful queries and ways to use them.

3. Sort by Important SEO Parameters

Now that you have your search results, all you have to do is sort your results by the most wanted parameters.

So if you want the highest PageRank results first, click on the Sort: PR: ?, and then the down arrow to show PageRank in descending order. Or use the Yahoo L: ? for the pages with the most amount of Yahoo backlinks (hopefully this will continue to work even though Bing is powering Yahoo) and Delicious I: ? for the number of Delicious bookmarks for a page (great way to indicate overall popularity). Other parameters available include Google cache date, Diggs, Reddit points, and several other page statistics.

Examples of How to Use These Parameters

So with the combination of this search query and being able to sort by different parameters, here are a few simple examples of different link building strategies and relevant queries and parameters to use.

Article Marketing

If you’re building links via article marketing, and want to see which articles have done the best, use the parameters for Yahoo backlinks and Delicious on a query for articles on your favorite directory:

Query: [“ezinearticles.com” site:ezinearticles.com intitle:keyword”

Blog Commenting

Find blog posts on your topic with the highest PageRank for link juice, or the most Yahoo and Delicious backlinks for popularity. Use the following query, depending on the site’s blog URL structure:

Query: [“domain.com/blog” site:domain.com keyword”

If this search brings up a lot of posts that aren’t about your topic (they just happen to have the keyword somewhere on the page), be sure to add “intitle:keyword” to your query to get posts with just the keyword in the title.

Directories

Want to know which subcategory has the strongest PageRank? Try the following query, based on the directory’s URL structure:

Query: [“dirjournal.com/arts/” site:dirjournal.com”

Your Strategy for Getting the Best Links?

What other tips would you add for using particular search queries and parameter sorting while link building?

Save up to $250! Register now for SES Chicago 2010, the Leading Search & Social Marketing Event, taking place October 18-22! Early Bird rates expire Oct. 1!