In the next 6-8 weeks, SEOmoz is looking to launch a link popularity measurement tool. The gold standard in our industry has long been MarketLeap's classic link popularity checker, but over the last few years, it's become less powerful and relevant. Our goal with this new tool will be to allow users to compare link numbers from several domains at a time through all of the major services that currently provide link data.
The following are the pieces of information I feel will be most valuable:
- Link count from Yahoo! Site Explorer (e.g. SEOmoz - 119,469)
- Link count from Yahoo! Site Explorer last page (e.g. SEOmoz - 114,341)
- Link count from Yahoo! Search (e.g. SEOmoz - 181,000)
- Link count from Yahoo! Search last page (e.g. SEOmoz - 175,000)
- Link count from MSN (e.g. SEOmoz - 105,991)
- Rank from Technorati (e.g. SEOmoz - 155)
- Link from Blogs via Technorati (e.g. SEOmoz - 7,883 from 2,590 blogs)
- Link count from Technorati (e.g. SEOmoz - 9,509)
- URL count from Google (e.g. SEOmoz - 610,000)
- URL count from Google filter off, last page (e.g. SEOmoz - 987 of 609,000)
- Link Count from Gigablast (e.g. SEOmoz - 409)
- Inlinks from Alexa (e.g. SEOmoz - 1,305)
To some, these 12 points of data might be overkill, but I think that a link tool that provides this level of detail would be invaluable for comparison purposes. Over time, I'm guessing that the data in aggregate could influence how we see the numbers and which we select as being most representative and accurate.
I've got one last question - are there any other pieces of link or link-related data that you'd want to see?
I was talking about this the other day with a colleague - we know that for reporting purposes, Yahoo Site Explorer allows you to download the data to a .tsv file. One step deeper may be a way to somehow intepret and display the number of outbound, off-domain links from each link result. This may not be completely relevant to the topic at hand, but may make link analysis a bit easier.
Rand,
We're busy on our end spec-ing out a linking tool for our use. Maybe we should exchange notes? ;-)
Some features we're looking into: - capturing "anchor text" for each link - how many links from domain.com, domain.com/asd and so on (much like the domain popularity EGOL mentions) - reverse of the above, how many links coming to domain.com, domain.com/asd and so on - Doing some sort of "Page Strength" on the domains that link to the site being analyzed - Do weekly, bimonthly, monthly updates
We’re looking for being mainly dependent on data from Yahoo and Google. There would be a separate section for social media type things like Technorati, Del.icio.us et cetera.
The difficult part is attempting to integrate this as part of a larger app that handles rankings/visibility and competitive analysis.
I wish I could have as many links as showing, that is a dream number for me
Rand... Lots of people have lots of links pointing at them from a very small number of sites (the guys who buy sitewides for example). So, would not "domain popularity" be a more valuable metric than "link popularity".
Probably would take a lot of scraping and counting to get that - but might be estimated by counting the number of Yahoo SERP PAGES for the linkdomain query? Or the ratio between link count and number of SERP pages.
As example for one query I have over 200 links counted but the results all show as 8 entries on one page because almost all of those links come from a couple of sites.
Coool! This would be my wish list.
Numbers of links per search engine. Anchor text of each link listed. Each result links to the specific page that the link can be found on. The page rank of the website or page the link is on.
If that is your goal, then I'd say that your list of data points is a good one to go off of... it sounds like it would basically be a glorified verion of MarketLeap's linkpop checker.
To make it truly useful, I like Matt's suggestion of mapping out the backlink trend over time. Also, it would be cool to see some sort of breakdown of backlinks in terms of "Page Strength"... "X" links with Page Strength 1 are linking to your site, "X" links with Page Strength 2, etc... and then have the ability to find these pages.
Since we're brainstorming here, it would also be cool to be able to see the age of the backlinks... anchor text (as someone already mentioned)...
Ooh... and then what about being able to see all that data for sites that link to the sites that link to yours? Like a co-citation analysis of sorts?
I guess I'm kind of coming more from a competitive intelligence perspective, but this would also help analyze the link structure of one's own site...
I know that there are already ways to do what I suggested above, but to have it all in one tool would be PIMP!
It wouldn't be too hard to make a tool like that, would it? :P
Is this tool doing something different than the Page Strength tool is already doing? Sounds like you're counting some additional links, but I'm not sure that I'd ever use this tool over Page Strength.
It would just be a link number comparison system, Rob. Page Strength pulls lots of different kinds of data about a site, while this is looking at things purely from a link numbers perspective.
How about an anchor text analysis versus a generic www.domain.com link?
You could ask the user to put one or a couple of anchor text that he find to be relevant for his site and provide an extensive analysis of these anchor texts.
Maybe it's irrelevant and/or difficult to implement, but from my comprehension of link development, that would be a interesting analysis to have.
Also, maybe you could analyse links in terms of the authority versus the not-that-relevant links?