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A Tale of Two Link Counts
March 29, 2007
The following doesn't tell the whole story, but I think it's an important chapter. The image at right shows a section of an inbound link report from Google Webmaster Tools.
This is the "external" link report -- that is, measuring links from outside domains. I've highlighted the inbound link counts for two deep URLs. On first glance, you might expect the first one (638) to be a dominant force in driving traffic, but you'd be wrong. Here's some deeper data on both URLs:
URL 1: 638 inbound links
- The 638 inbound links represent 14 total domains. (For the purposes of this analysis, I'm saying that foo.blogspot.com and bar.blogspot.com are distinct domains.)
- 615 of the links come from an ROS (run-of-site) blogroll link on one personal blog (blogspot.com).
- Of the remaining 23 links, 14 come from eight other blogs at sites like blogspot, livejournal, or blogsome.
- Of the remaining nine links, four come from social bookmarking-type sites, most of which "nofollow" their outbound links. (Remember that Google reports nofollowed links too.)
- The final five links come from a total of three separate blogs on unique domains.
When you break down the links, there's not a great deal of substance there. The page is a poor traffic driver, although it's premature to blame that entirely on the quality of the incoming links.
URL 2: 38 inbound links
- The 38 inbound links represent 33 unique domains.
- Only one domain in the list of 33 is easily identifiable as a blog host (livejournal.com)
- About half of the remaining 32 are low-quality and/or scrapers.
- The other half of the remaining 32 are decent sites whose foci match the point of the page on my client's site.
Week in, week out, URL 2 is the site's top entry page, outperforming even the home page. Again -- not necessarily because of the quality of the links. But this reinforces the point that quantity of inbound links cannot make up for lack of quality.
see all posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at March 29, 2007 09:08 PM
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Comments
I've been meaning to dig into the new link reporting feature since they introduced it a few weeks ago. I didn't realize that they'd be including nofollow links. I would've agreed with your point (i.e. that quality is more important than quantity) before finding that out, so the fact that nofollows are being included just makes you more right. It just goes to show you not to trust your web metrics at face value. ;)
Posted by: Stephen Ward at March 30, 2007 03:18 PM
Cheers for reminding people its about quality not quantity when it comes to links. From our clients we've generally found a five decent high quality relevant links can be worth more than 500 less desirable links.
Posted by: kelvin newman at April 2, 2007 06:04 AM
Ok i am agree with you. is the signature links worth? because now a days people are selling their signature links in lots of forums. is One good PR1 link is better than 500 PR0 signature links? and if yes but in other way you can get good search engine rankings for placing anchor text as your keywords for your site/blog. Its working for my sites.
Please let me know if i am right.
Posted by: Ashish K Arora at August 12, 2007 01:44 PM