Search engines place an extremely high priority on helping searchers find relevant and useful content through search. This is why SEO techniques oriented toward helping users, are ultimately more effective than doing SEO specifically for high ranking.
If you want to see your page rank improve, consider creating end user value within your website, based on the needs of people. If you consider the following aspects, you will have no problems.
Choose relevant sources
- Forums, if your post is under the best category
- Blogs from same niche
- Websites, with genuine content
- Be very careful not to link to/from bad/banned sites. Linking to/from banned sites by Google, or sites with illegal content can drop your position in Google, or even ban your website
Search for their brand
- If they are relevant on their niche, they should probably be on one of the top positions in the search results
Content is important
- You can use Google’s search to find out how many indexed page that website has (site:website.com)
- If it’s a blog, you can look for a post that is a few days or a few months old, and search its title on Google. If the blog is trusted by Google, the post should be one of the top search results
The age of the site
- If the site exists for one month and it has 100.000 indexed pages, it definitely doesn't have quality content
Inbound links
- You can also check this with Google (link:website.com) to find out if their inbound links are coming from irrelevant blog comments or from unrelated sites
- Verify the “nofollow” attribute. A link with “nofollow” has no SEO value. Still, if the link is from a very relevant and reputable source, it can help you gain visitors
Google PageRank
- Though nowadays the PR relevancy is very unstable, it could be use as a guideline. Be aware of the fact that PR is a good indication that the site has good backlinks, but does not mean it is a relevant and reputable source
Happy SEO-ing!