Checking Backlinks and Link Building
Posted Friday 11th September 2009 by Tom P in Link Building.
Organic Link Building
Link building is arguably the life blood of search engine optimisation. There is much speculation about link building strategies and the measurement of backlinks, particularly how search engines are now valuing backlinks. When you are measuring your backlinks there are a number of online resources available and different tools will throw back different results.
A good example of the difference in perceived links is the website Complywise. According to the research tool Backlinkwatch this website has 737 inbound links; this number is disputable when using other resources. Google seemingly will only report a “representative sample” of these backlinks leading to inconclusive results for SEO experts.
Showing Internal Links
Causes for this difference in link measurement could be because major search engines do not report on repetitive links. For instance while Backlinkwatch will show inbound links from a site as well as its various extensions and internal links within a site, search engines tend to only recognise the initial link as well as the first five to ten extensions. Once again however, this information is conjectural; as the link measuring tools for all the major search engines will potentially disregard links from sites it has not indexed.
How does this information affect potential link building strategies? Many agree that whilst in the past search engines were simply happy to recognise the number of backlinks as a measure of authority, the growing trend shows that a focus on the quality of backlinks rather than the quantity is evident.
Content Based Linking
This has thrown some doubt over traditional content based linking. Over the past two years the power of links from articles and blogs seems to have waned. This change in focus can be attributed to the further development of duplicate content filters on the part of the search engines or the devaluation of links from sources that the search engines deem as not authoritative.
This duplication refers not only to the content itself but also to the websites from which content based links are gained. As many article and blog distribution services have uniform distribution lists, search engines are devaluing links from the websites within these lists. Once again a focus on quality over quantity could be regarded as a way to combat this shift in link emphasis.
When you are checking the amount of backlinks to your website, do not be too alarmed if you get some fluctuation in the volume of links thrown back; especially when you are checking via a search engine related resource. We have noticed that Yahoo is pretty accurate whilst Bing and Google tend to condense results.
This does make a vague statement regarding link building strategies and reading between the lines we believe that traditional organic link building strategies are starting to devalue. Quality has replaced quantity and Google is valuing authoritative sites much more, as our preliminary evaluation of Google Caffeine has indicated.
Related Posts
- Content Based Link Building In Search Engine Optimisation
- SEO Basics: Backlinks and Link Building
- Social Bookmarking For Backlinks
- Can Social Networking Sites Be Your Own Personal Link Directory?
- Link Wheeling Your Site
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September 17th, 2009 at 4:50 pm