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Measuring Link Popularity

by Ken McGaffin

22 Mar 2005 - LinkingMatter.com. On 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 LinkPopularity that tests several search engines at once or download free software from CheckLink 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 analysing a significant sample of these links we found:

• 63% were internal corporate links
• 14% were dull, pharmaceutical directories
• 12% were academic sites
• 5% were suppliers.

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:

• To appear in link popularity results, the site upon which the link sits must have been indexed by search engines. But search engines still index only a fraction of all the web pages available. If your link sits on this ‘invisible web’, it won’t be returned.

• Even if the site on which your link sits has been indexed, there are still problems. First, if the link was added since the site was last indexed then it won’t show up. And second, if your link is buried deep within the site, it may not appear.

• Sites with restricted access or membership only areas - often sources of rich information and links - will not be accessible to search engines.
Many link popularity tests return internal links - links from within the site itself. This shows that the content has been well-structured and optimised for search engines, but it does distort the scores on link popularity. AltaVista, for one overcomes this with the command - link:www.yoursite.com -url:www.yoursite.com.

• Search results can be inconsistent. This is because different searches may be carried out on different indexes. As Craig Silverstein of Google writes, "There are many reasons why one might see a difference in the estimated number of pages returned for the same query. It’s most likely the queries ... were sent to different Google datacenters. Depending on which datacenter finishes a query, the estimated number of results may vary."

• 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:

• Analyse the type and quality of the links that currently exist. Look for any information you can use to measure effectiveness.

• Identify the top 20, the top 50 or the top 100 sites that you would like to link to you. How many of these currently link to your site? Use that as a benchmark - so if 20 of the top 100 sites currently link to you, set yourself a target of 40.

• Check your referrer logs frequently and keep a note of referring URLs. Note which URLs drive most traffic to your site.

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.

Search Engine Marketing - The Way Forward

Search Engine Marketing is rapidly becoming the most powerful form of Direct Marketing for corporates. Find out how Highlander Marketing can help improve your online marketing strategies.

(PRWEB) May 18, 2005 -- It's an exciting world we live in. Ten years ago, if we wanted to find out more about new products to buy we either had to wait for one of the newly-launched technology magazines to tell us all about it, or get in the car and go to the shops to find out what was available to us, product technical details, when it would be available and, most of all, how much damage it was going to do to our wallets.

Today, researching new products has moved on vastly thanks to the power of the Internet and the majority of us now use search engines to find exactly what we're looking for. Studies show that on average we do three searches across different engines, starting with a generic term like 'vacuum cleaner' before tying our terms down to a specific brand. Pretty straight forward, then, if you're looking to buy something.

The difficulty comes when you are the seller, trying to grab the attention of those using the Internet to find the product they're looking for. Search Engine Marketing, unsurprisingly, is rapidly becoming the fastest method of direct marketing that corporate and retail companies can use to drive traffic to their website and ultimately increase revenues for their organisation. The difficulty, however, is understanding just how to get your site to appear in the first page of the search engines' results, and then how to understand how much traffic that marketing has driven to your site and, ultimately, what revenue it has driven.

EAch of the search engines uses different methodology in order to review and rank a website and getting to the front page of one's results might have you listed on page ten of another's. The quickest solution to this is keyword marketing, allowing you to pay to ensure you appear in the result of a specific search. The challenge, though, is managing a vast collection of keywords and ensuring that the price paid for each keyword is not over the top. Additionaly, you have to adjust your bids to guarantee your link appears in the right place at the right time / day / week, within the right search engine; this can be a complex, time-consuming and, often, costly task. All that before you've even tried to figure out just how effective such marketing is.

Highlander's Online Marketing division offers corporate solutions to resolve all of these issues. With ten years' experience providing conultancy and software for web development and web analytics solutions, our Online Marketing team are experts in providing consultancy and solutions for your Search Engine Marketing needs. Whether it is Search Engine Optimisation to ensure strong rankings within the free search - or 'organic' search engine results - or whether you need a solution that can manage all your paid-placement campaigns within the myriad of search engines and shopping engines that dominate the web, Highlander Marketing can provide a solution to all your needs.

If, like me, you're excited by the prospect of using S.E.M. to improve your website's results and grow your Return On Investment, pop along to stand 332 at this year's Search Engine Strategies expo in London or get in touch with me on 0870 950 9759; I'll be happy to discuss your strategies further.

Mark J Daniels
Manager - Online Marketing Strategies
Highlander Marketing

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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