People make the mistake all the time in judging the strength of a website by the number of links. It’s really of no surprise as the most common way to check the inbound links to a website is by doing an inbound link search on Yahoo Site explorer. This is done by typing into the yahoo search box:
link:www.mydomain.com
For the below examples I will use http://www.seo-services.com
Now while the link count shows 18,404 inbound links to my website… it is pretty much meaningless. You can conceivably have 18,000 links all from one website if you had a site-wide link on a huge website. In fact… focusing on your total link number can even trigger google penalties! Say you did get a site-wide link with the exact anchor text on every page of an 18,000 page website, that would likely cause a red flag to Google as this is the definition of a google bomb. You should expect a keyword penalty of the anchor text keyword you used for this, and if you’re lucky, you will just not receive the link credit for this spam.
The metric that really matters is the amount of linking root domains.
Now other similar metrics are Referring IP Addresses, and Class C Subnets… but they generally referring to the same thing.
Question: What is a linking root domain?
Answer: An individual website that is linking to you. Ex. http://google.com. Now this would include all subdomains (http://gmail.google.com, http://webmastertools.google.com, http://www.google.com, http://google.com, etc). Pretty much *google.com.
Now there are some great tools out there that you can use for free to get these valuable statistics. My favorite are:
http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/
and
Now while the linking root domains/referring domains are not exact, they are a much better measure of the work a site owner has done in link building. Obviously the total external links will be different from yahoo’s counts, as seomoz and majestic do not have the index size as the major search engines (although they are still very big).
So forget about the total external links! And don’t you dare bring up page rank. Linking root domains is where it is at.
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Twitter: brucej52
October 20, 2011 at 7:24 pm
With the recent Google ranking changes that penalize certain link building practices, what would be a safe number of links to harvest daily to prevent Google from bombing you? As an SEO novice and affiliate marketer have always appreciated your blog’s content. Thanks
There really is no set rule for this… The most important thing is to vary up the anchor text you use. If you use the same anchor text you run a strong chance of getting penalized for the particular keyword.
Seomoz also has a cool toolbar/addon for browsers that lets you see all kinds of data for each page. For instance I can see that this is a nofollow blog by clicking a button to highlight the dofollow links. It also shows linking root domains if you’re a pro user, but there’s tons of good free info, you know how seomoz does, give a little free, pay for the advanced stuff.
Questions, why make your blog dofollow or nofollow? I mean I have mine as nofollow but they get way less posts, less spam I’m sure but wouldn’t comments be good?
I’m a novice btw.
Twitter: richindesigns
March 14, 2012 at 8:15 am
Helpful post thanks for sharing, I needed the matter root domain links cleared up in my mind and this post did just that
If your looking to find do-dollow links scrapebox is about the best tool going, its just one of many features and its around the $40 mark, id suggest picking it up