links

August 5, 2016 by Bill Treloar 2 Comments

How Many Incoming Links Do I Really Have?

On August 5, 2016 / analytics, links, PageRank / 2 Comments

Your Link Profile Is an Important Ranking Factor

Your website’s link profile is an essential ranking factor at Google. It’s a reflection of how important or authoritative information on your website is. Your link profile is based on the number and sources of inbound links to your site. I estimate it counts for 40-50% of where you rank on Google. And while link quality outweighs link counts, many of our clients still like to know how their link counts are doing.

Where do we get your link counts?

In the past we’ve tracked inbound link counts from a number of sources, including Moz, SEMrush, Majestic, and ahrefs.

We track the number of inbound links you have grapohically and report it to you regularly. Link count him him him him hims is one of the factors that goes into your Domain Authority. — We track the growth of inbound link counts and report it to our clients regularly.

We now collect our link counts from Moz for simplicity and because they have the most comprehensive scan of the web from which they gather that information.
Link age may be a consideration: older links may count less than fresher links. Link weight is also important: the weight of a link is related to the authority of the linking page so that links from more authoritative pages count significantly more heavily in your favor than links from lesser sources. Link relevance is a factor too, with links from websites related to your business helping more than links from completely unrelated sources.

Links to your website help you rank higher in Google. How many do you really have?

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We periodically report to clients about their inbound link counts well as counts of how many other websites are linking. Some websites (domains) may link to you from multiple pages, resulting in a difference between total links and linking domains. Sometimes that difference is considerable.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority and Page Authority are other metrics from the folks at Moz to measure the strength of a website or an individual page in terms of its likelihood to rank prominently in web search results. On a logarithmic 0-100 scale, it’s based on a number of more elementary metrics including link counts, linking domains, link quality, and more. It’s being continuously tweaked via machine learning against actual Google search results

[Updated on January 29, 2021.]

If you’d like to know more or have us track your own link profile, just reach out anytime.

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Have something to say about this? Start or join the conversation in the comments below.

May 8, 2014 by Bill Treloar 4 Comments

Why Did Your Nice, New Website Destroy Your Search Rankings?

On May 8, 2014 / canonicalization, domains/URLs, links, redirects, web design / 4 Comments

Loss of Rankings It’s sad to say, but we see this all too often. An old website gets a facelift, and the new site looks great. But it’s not long before the website owner notices that they’re no longer getting any business from people finding them on the web. What happened?
We’ve written before about why good SEO consultants make lousy web designers, and vice versa, and there are just some SEO techniques that great web designers don’t really think much about.

The two mistakes that kill your online visibility

There are two main factors that govern where you rank in the search engines

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There are two main factors that govern where you rank in the search engines: Relevance and Reputation. A significant problem with either one of them will cost you rankings in the search engines.

Relevance

During the website redesign, the text copy on your pages may be updated. Certainly the HTML code behind the pages is changed. It’s not at all uncommon for the new copy to fail to use some of your essential keyword phrases or for them not to be included appropriately in the code. This makes it difficult for search engines to recognize that your page is an appropriate match for those keyword phrases.
The solution to this is to go back to your original optimization recommendations and re-apply them to your webpages. (You do have optimization recommendations to reapply, don’t you?)

Reputation

This accounts for 40-50% of where you rank in Google. It’s important in other search engines as well, but Google weighs it more heavily than the rest of them. Your reputation (sometimes called “authority”) is measured by your link popularity:” the number and quality of other websites that link to yours. Over time, the pages on your website have earned significant link popularity, helping them to rank well in the search engines.

Unfortunately, most website redesign projects result in new URLs for the pages on your website. Without explicit action, all the link popularity earned by you or previous page URLs is simply lost. This is related to the issue of canonicalization we discuss in the SEO portion of our website, as well as in our blog.
The solution is to do the proper kind of “redirect” from the old URL to the new URL so that the new URL can inherit the link popularity and reputation earned by your previous version of the page. There are multiple kinds of redirects that will ensure that anyone who tries to go to your old page will be sent to the new one. But only one kind, the 301 permanent redirect, will also redirect the link popularity value from the old URL to the new one.

Only a 301 permanent redirect, will redirect link popularity from an old URL to the new one.

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Don’t Panic

Obviously, if this happens to you you need to jump on it as quickly as possible and get things fixed. Better still would be to anticipate this potential disaster and deal with it before your redesigned website even goes live.
If this has happened to you and you need help recovering from the loss of search rankings, Rank Magic can help.
Has this happened to you? Share your experience in the Comments below.
WE hope you’ll Like, Tweet or +1 this post if you found it helpful.

February 6, 2013 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

How to Disavow Bad Links

On February 6, 2013 / Bing, Google, links / Leave a Comment

Links Web sites suffering a significant loss of rankings as a result of the Penguin Update last spring have been scrambling to correct the factors that have hurt them. One main class of factors is on-page keyword stuffing. The other main factor is a bad inbound link profile.

Bad Backlink Profile

If you’re getting too many links with keyword-rich anchor text (the clickable text in the link that points to you) and few or none of the more generic type (your URL, your company or website name, or “click here”) that may be taken as another kind of keyword stuffing.

Also, if you’ve engaged a company to get you tons of links from non-relevant websites or participated in link farms, those links can hurt you as well. Some inexpensive off-shore outfits promise hundreds or thousands of backlinks to your site from websites they own and control which were set up just for the purpose of providing those links. Others send comment spam to unrelated blogs, hoping those comments will be accepted and provide links back.

Some website owners worry that people might point bad links at their sites in an attempt to harm them with “negative SEO.”

All of these bogus or artificial links carry the risk of earning you a Penguin penalty. You need to try to get those links removed or dis-counted so they don’t continue to weigh down your rankings.

Disavowing Links in Google

If you’ve contacted the webmasters of sites with bad links to you and have been unsuccessful in getting them to remove those links, Google has a “link disavowal” tool that can tell Google you disapprove of those links and they shouldn’t count toward your link authority. That will also cause them not to count toward a Penguin penalty as well. Google says this about the tool:

If you’ve done as much work as you can to remove spammy or low-quality links from the web, and are unable to make further progress on getting the links taken down, you can disavow the remaining links. In other words, you can ask Google not to take certain links into account when assessing your site.

Search Engine Land wrote about the process a few weeks ago and their article is worth a read. To go straight to the Google tool, click here. I encourage you also to read Google’s instructions.

Caveat from Google

This is an advanced feature and should only be used with caution. If used incorrectly, this feature can potentially harm your site’s performance in Google’s search results. We recommend that you disavow backlinks only if you believe you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial, or low-quality links pointing to your site, and if you are confident that the links are causing issues for you. In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool.

Bing has a Disavowal Tool, Too

To disavow links in Bing, you can do the same thing via Bing Webmaster Tools. An article about how to do that is here. I’ve seen no sign of a similar tool from Yahoo, but that may be unnecessary as Yahoo and Bing share the same index.

If you’ve suffered a Penguin Penalty, take a look at your incoming links and see if they may be the cause of your trouble.

If you need help with that, Rank Magic can help.

February 13, 2012 by Bill Treloar 1 Comment

Do Links From Blog Posts Help Your Link Popularity?

On February 13, 2012 / blogs, links / 1 Comment

Blog posts are really just web pages

So a link to your site from a blog post counts just like any other link. But there are a couple of considerations to bear in mind in terms of how beneficial the blog links will be for you.

The value of the link is a function of three things:

The authority of the blog post linking to you (higher is better)
The number of outbound links on that blog post (lower is better)
Whether the blog post is on your domain or not (being on another domain adds some weight to the link)

Do Links From Blog Posts Help Your Link Popularity?

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How about links from your own blog?

If you’re concerned about links from your own blog posts, let’s discuss that last issue a bit. We always recommend that our clients host their blogs on their own websites rather than on another domain. Does that mean links from a blog post to pages on your own website count less than if your blog was on another domain? Actually, yes — a bit. But don’t worry.

Links to your web pages from blog posts on your own domain may be somewhat less powerful than they would be if from another domain, but not enough to make up for the loss of authority you’d suffer from hosting your blog on another domain. So don’t move your blog off your domain just so the links back are a tad more beneficial. Unless you devote time and attention to building link equity on the external blog domain in addition to your main domain, the authority links impart to your main domain will be very low. Instead, syndicate your blog.

And links from your blog post to other pages on your site actually helps with the target page’s relevance. These internal, contectual links can be very valuable.

Syndication

When you write a blog post, you can have it duplicated on blog aggregators, and the links to your web pages from those copies of your post will count as external inbound links. There are lots of these available to you — as an example, see Business2Community or BlogEngage.

Done right, your blog can help your link popularity at the same time that it funnels potential customers into the marketing content on your website. That’s certainly a winning proposition.

For professional help with maximizing your blogging power, SEO for your website, or building link popularity, contact us at Rank Magic.

August 8, 2011 by Bill Treloar Leave a Comment

Can You Really Get Links By Email Requests?

On August 8, 2011 / email, links / Leave a Comment

Relevant incoming links may count as much as 40% toward top rankings in Google.

To show up in Google searches, you need adequate link authority based on the number and quality of other websites that link to yours. But just sitting back and waiting for links to happen by accident isn’t a meaningful action plan. One potentially fruitful approach is to find relevant websites and send them an email asking them to link to you.

Email link requests have gotten a bad name.

Most website owners with any degree of visibility on the web get link request emails. Most often these are poorly written and come from off-shore mass link builders. They’re pretty easy to identify and most people just delete them as spam. So working with inexpensive foreign link builders seldom provides any true benefit. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be effective if it’s done properly.

According to Website Magazine,

Direct link requests get a bad wrap as they are used (and often used poorly) by those that either don’t care or don’t know any better (believing inbound link volume outweighs inbound link quality – which it doesn’t). It should not have to be said but know that email link requests do not typically work when they are misdirected or provide no immediate or long term benefit to those providing the link.

But there are things you can do to increase the positive response to your link request emails.

How Many Incoming Links Do I Really Have?

Your Link Profile Is an Important Ranking Factor