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Measuring Link PopularityOn the face of
it, measuring the link popularity of a website is simple. However, inherent
flaws in the measurement process may at best give some meaningless results and
at worst underestimate the effectiveness of your link building work. Most search
engines allow you to identify and count the number of links coming back into
your site. On Google, for example, just enter link:www.yoursite.com
and you’ll find a list of sites that link to you. You could also use one of the
link checking sites like http://www.linkpopularity.com
that tests several search engines at once or download free software from http://www.checkyourlinkpopularity.com
to easily check your own site, your clients’ and your competitors sites. However, the
results from such tests should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Let’s take an
example based on some work we’ve done for a large pharmaceutical company that
wanted to build on the number of inbound links they had from health portals. A
quick check on their link popularity showed that they have a healthy 5,500
inbound links. But it turns
out that these links are not all they seem. By analyzing a
significant sample of these links we found:
We found that
less than 1% - that’s an estimated 55 sites - were the type of valuable links
they were after. Now suppose we
undertook a linking strategy and generated 50 additional quality links from
exactly the sort of health portals they were after. On a pure
numbers basis, our work would have increased their link popularity from 5,500
to 5,550, an insignificant 1% increase. But in reality, the strategy would have
almost doubled the number of quality inbound links to their site - from 55 to
105 - a very significant impact. There are
other flaws with link popularity measurement:
Furthermore, a
search engine’s priority is to help people find relevant information. Helping
webmasters and site owners find backward links accurately may not be near the
top of their priorities. So what should
you measure? Link
popularity checkers are very useful as a guide and for research purposes they
can be tremendous. However, using them as a metric to judge the effectiveness
of your linking work should be treated with caution. By all means
use them to give you a rough idea, but build some solid metrics into each
linking project you undertake. Here are some
things you should think about:
Measuring
return on investment is a key business discipline that we all have to address.
Putting some thought into what you should measure for each individual linking
project will not only prove your worth, but will give you valuable insights
into how you can sharpen and improve your linking strategy. Ken
McGaffin Linkingmatters.com Ken
McGaffin provides link building services to
established and newly launched websites. He is the author of the highly
acclaimed 'Linking Matters Report', which can be downloaded for free at http://www.linkingmatters.com. Article reproduced with Ken McGaffin’s permission. |
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