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Spider
01-09-2011, 12:50 PM
Just found this - well, it was sent to me by Submit Express - one of those SEO/SEM companies whose newsletter I receive.

Link Popularity Check Tool (http://www.submitexpress.com/link-popularity-check.html)

Very interesting. I found that my site has a total of -- 1299 backlinks

7 from Bing
32 from Google
84 from Blekko, and
1,176 from Yahoo.

Now, the questions are several. How come I have so many links from Yahoo! and don't get much traffic from them - and what can I do to get more traffic from all those links?

And, How can I get more links in Google and Bing?

And, Who is Blekko? Seems like a fairly new search engine, and a nice one at that, even though they haven't sent me any visitors yet that I know of.

Harold Mansfield
01-09-2011, 01:38 PM
Now, the questions are several. How come I have so many links from Yahoo! and don't get much traffic from them - and what can I do to get more traffic from all those links?

Yahoo calculates links differently than the others. You can't do anything to get more traffic from them since you have no control over where the links are and how much traffic the source gets. Most of what is listed as "links" is actually pages indexed. They could be as far back in the serps as the numbers allow. You could have 1000 pages indexed or "linked" in Yahoo but they could all be 500 pages back or in supplemental results.


And, How can I get more links in Google and Bing?
Start reading and following the suggestions in Google and Bing webmaster tools.
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en
Bing Toolbox (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/)


And, Who is Blekko?
Just another search engine. There are 1000's of them and they all have spiders (scripts) that scan the web to index as much of it as possible. Sort of like a monkey swinging on a tree grabbing what ever branch is closely connected to the one before it.

jamesray50
01-09-2011, 04:02 PM
I have 8 in Bing and 175 in Yahoo, 0 in Google and Blekko.

vangogh
01-10-2011, 12:07 PM
Take the numbers with a grain of salt. For example Google doesn't report all the links it knows about whereas Yahoo includes anything and everything. A better source of Google links is to sign up for Webmaster Tools. Inside they'll share more information about your site. They don't share the information publicly to make it harder to reverse engineer the linking part of their algorithm.

Generally with tools like this you're looking more for a relative comparison between you and other sites or your own site over time. It can be useful to find out who is link to your competitors, because often those other sites may also link to you as well.

jamesray50
01-10-2011, 12:22 PM
Take the numbers with a grain of salt. For example Google doesn't report all the links it knows about whereas Yahoo includes anything and everything. A better source of Google links is to sign up for Webmaster Tools. Inside they'll share more information about your site. They don't share the information publicly to make it harder to reverse engineer the linking part of their algorithm.

Generally with tools like this you're looking more for a relative comparison between you and other sites or your own site over time. It can be useful to find out who is link to your competitors, because often those other sites may also link to you as well.

I did sign up with Google Webmaster Tool. I can't get the sitemap on my website because I can't figure out how to put an xml sitemap on my website. I have searched on the Mircosoft forums and followed their directions, but it didn't work, so I gave up.

vangogh
01-10-2011, 11:43 PM
It's not fun to create. If you were using WordPress there are several plugins that do it for you automatically. We have one with vBulletin for the forum. The good news is you don't really need one. An xml sitemap is more a backup if search engines can't crawl your site. Something good to have, but not necessary. There are tutorials for creating them by hand, but again not fun to do.

You don't need to create one to use Webmaster Tools. I don't have one for my main site and I can use Webmaster Tools fine and see all the links they show.

Spider
01-11-2011, 08:08 AM
I read somewhere recently that an xml sitemap was not as beneficial as a straightforward html sitemap. Can't remember why but I noticed it because I have an html sitemap and not a xml sitemap. By linking to my sitemap from from my index page, and from my sitemap to every other page on my site, SE spiders can get to every page in two steps. I also include on my sitemap a link to the homepages of other sites I own. Thus, every public thing I own on the web is indexed by every search engine that finds it.

Getting IN the search engines isn't difficult. Getting to the front - now, that's a different story!

Harold Mansfield
01-11-2011, 10:15 AM
I have to agree that sitemaps aren't completely necessary and that Google is going to index you fast and steady. Just having a sitemap is only part of the equation. If you want it to have any benefit you need to submit it.
The more incoming links you have makes it easier for all spiders to find you. Sitemap or not.

The exception to the rule is probably Bing (which is Microsoft) which is notoriously slow about indexing pages. if there were any place that you would want to submit your sitemap, it's probably there.

vangogh
01-11-2011, 11:45 AM
Search engines crawl the web look for pages to index. Once they find your site they'll crawl within your site to index your content. However search engines won't crawl your site indefinitely. They generally spend more time crawling your site if they consider your site more important. At a very basic level the higher your PageRank the more important they think you are. Search engines will also only crawl so deep into your site at any time. Maybe on one visit they crawl 3 levels starting from your home page, which counts as the first level. Any page that you can't get to from your home page within 2 clicks isn't going to get crawled on that visit.

An html sitemap usually contains a link to every page on your site so every page is 1 click away from your html sitemap. If you place a link to your sitemap on every page, say in the footer, then every page on your site is no more than 2 clicks away from any other page. One click to get to the sitemap and one more click to get to the page.

The idea behind an xml sitemap is you're sending a list of all the pages you want search engines to index to the search engines directly. Search engines make no guarantees they'll index everything in your xml sitemap, but they generally recommend using one. In the case where they can't find one page because it's too far away clickwise from others or because links to that page are broken or for any other reason, an xml sitemap helps search engines understand what content you have on your site.

If you've done a good job in setting up your site, have navigation that's easy for search engines to crawl, use an html sitemap, and generally create no major problems for search engines finding your pages, you probably don't need an xml sitemap. On the other hand if you find not all of your pages are being indexed, but some are it's possible you have problems with the structure of your pages. I think in the latter case it's better to find and fix those problems, but an xml sitemap can also help search engines find those pages.

If you have a small site an xml sitemap probably isn't going to help much. Odds are most of your pages are in the root folder (where your index/home page is located) and you probably have simple navigation. If your site grows to be hundreds or thousands of pages it's more likely there will be some issues in regards to being crawled and finding and fixing those issues could be more difficult. If that happens then you might want to use an xml sitemap.

I currently don't use one on my site, but will probably add one when I redesign it. WordPress (as well as many other CMSs) has several plugins that will generate and update an xml sitemap for you. Given how easy that makes it to set up and update as you add new pages it makes sense to have it in place just in case. I set up a module here on the forum that generates and updates an xml sitemap here.

CloptonCapital
03-29-2011, 01:32 AM
My link popularity constantly jumps back and forth by a factor of quadruple so I don't trust these rankings