Do you think this is a good idea?

[sstrick]

I have an idea that might help people evaluate casually the strength of backlinks. I'm thinking of building an upvoting list of backlink pages. People can vote on how they feel the strength of the backlink site has personally helped them. This would not be algorithmic or scientific, just a community of people rating their actual success with the strength of the backlinks for particular sites.

Thoughts?

Thanks!

[sstrick]

Thank you for the responses everybody I appreciate your input.

[dohertyjf]

I definitely agree with EGOL and Julie that both of those would happen.

HOWEVER, I do think there is a way to make this super useful to people and have it not be spammy. Charge for it. You'll have to figure out how to initially seed the community (it will be a community after all) with links and how to divide them up according to verticals/types of links, but if you don't let people be anonymous then you can keep it high quality (seeing Rand upvoted a link as opposed to Linksinator757 is super valuable) more easily.

Fun thought experiment for sure!

John

[julie-getonthemap]

I think the law of unintended consequences would kick in ... soon you'd see Fiverr offerings to get 5 upvotes for your link page for $5.

[sstrick]

Thanks for the input!

[EGOL]

This explanation approaches the topic from a tangent... just sayin' before you start readin'....

You really gotta be careful about following advice given on SEO forums and SEO Q&A sites - including advice given by me and what you read on Moz - or ANY other site for that matter.  Lots of it is given by people who are just kibitzin' and lots is given by people who don't know a damn thing.   So..... if you are a reasonably intelligent person, you pay attention to who is talkin' and use the advice from some people as a starting point and immediately disregard advice from others.  Don't trust very much without confirming yourself because some people say what they think they know and don't know what they don't know.

For the reasons above, I would not trust a community sourced backlink assessment.  I might trust someone like Marie Haynes for opinions on backlinks, but if I don't have that I am going to assess the link myself.

The sniff test works on many backlinks.  Its really easy to spot a spammy site and its really easy to say that links from NASA, LOC.gov or the Pope are gonna be good ones.  It's the links in between that are hard to assess.  And, on those, I wouldn't trust three upvotes from people I don't know.