See who links to your web site.
See who links to your web site.
Link-Popularity.com: See who links to your web site. This service provides an easy one-click method of checking link popularity on three of the major search engines. They also provide a free monthly customized Link Popularity Report via e-mail.
Is your site being penalized for low link popularity?
Link Popularity (the number of web pages that link to a site) has become a critically important factor in driving traffic to a web site. Unfortunately, new sites and sites with low link popularity are at an severe disadvantage and often find it very hard to attract new visitors. Here's why...
Although rarely stated in plain english, search engines do not like and do not trust unpopular web sites!
This sounds extreme, but starts to make sense if you think about it from the search engine's perspective. Search engines evaluate millions of web pages and display them in order of relevancy. In the past, search engines have played a continual cat and mouse game with thousands of webmasters who try to 'trick the engines' or 'beat the system'. Given the rewards of a good ranking, some webmasters would create thousands of computer generated pages hoping to trick the search engines into assigning them a good ranking. These pages would look bad to a human, but would occasionally rank well. This happened more and more, and engines started to fill up with 'junk' listings.
Around this time, search engines started to discover that link popularity was a very effective way to weed out 'junk' pages and a good way to judge a site. Link popularity is very difficult to abuse (a webmaster would have to control tens or hundreds of sites located on different servers). Also, search engines found that judging a site by who links to it is one of the best indications of site quality. After all, not many webmasters make a habit out of linking to bad or less than useful web sites.
Although search engines don't come right out and say they don't like unpopular sites, it's easy to read between the lines...
1. Search engines now discourage manually submitting your site saying that they will find your site by following links on the web.
Google says (in their FAQ) that submitting is not necessary and that "The best way to ensure Google finds your site is for your page to be linked from lots of pages on other sites. Google's robots jump from page to page on the Web via hyperlinks, so the more sites that link to you, the more likely it is that we'll find you quickly."
Yahoo says (in their FAQ) that "The Yahoo! Search index, which contains several billion web pages, is more than 99% populated through the free crawl process. Yahoo! Search crawls the web every 2-4 weeks and automatically finds new content for indexing."
MSN advises (in their Site Owner Help) to "Make sure that each page is accessible by at least one static text link.".
2. Sites can be delisted from a search engine if enough pages do not link to it.
In their FAQ, Google explains that one of the possible reasons your web pages used to be listed and are now aren't is that.... 'The contents of your page or the links pointing to your page changed significantly and you no longer have a sufficiently high PageRank, or your page had low PageRank to begin with and a small change caused you to be dropped from the Google index.'
3. Once included in a search engine index, sites with higher link popularity are heavily favored
Google says (in their Technology Overview) that "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. "
Yahoo suggests (in their FAQ),that you should "Correspond with webmasters and other content providers and build rich linkages between related pages." to improve the ranking of your web site in their search results.
MSN says (in their Site Owner Help section), "The MSN Search ranking algorithm analyzes factors such as page content, the number and quality of sites that link to your pages, and the relevance of your site’s content to keywords."
How many links is enough?
Once site owners realize the importance of link popularity, the first question they ask is usually 'how many links do I need?'. The frustrating answer is.... it depends!
All sites need a basic amount of links as a starting point. These links prevent the search engines from treating a site as an "orphan site" (one which is not linked to) and improve the chances of the search engine finding the site's pages to add to its index.
Some sites only need ten or twenty good incoming links to rank well. Others in highly competitive industries need hundreds or even thousands. The best way to tell is to run a Link Popularity report on your site and on your competitors' sites. If your competition is outranking you and has many more incoming links, you should probably start thinking about increasing your link popularity.
Increasing your link popularity
Luckily, there are several highly effective ways of increasing your link popularity. Proper use of link popularity reports can give you the information you need to evaluate your situation and act accordingly. Better yet, running the right link popularity reports can show you exactly where your competitors are receiving traffic from and provide you with hundreds of handpicked sites interested in linking to your site.
Locating qualified link prospects
Learning how to find the right sites to approach is essential to increasing your link popularity. Approaching the wrong sites can quickly sabotage your efforts - selecting the right ones can help pave the way to quickly and effectively increasing your link popularity.
Unfortunately, it can be difficult and time consuming to find the right types of sites to approach. First you need to find sites which are relevant to your site. These are sites whose content is related to yours or whose visitors are likely to be interested in your site. Of these, many may not link to external sites. Others may not feel that your site is relevant to theirs. Weeding out these types of sites can be very time consuming. Luckily, there is a better way...
Insider's Secret - running link popularity reports on competitors
How would you like to be handed a list of web sites which are relevant to your web site and have already demonstrated their 'link-friendliness' by linking to a site very similar to yours?
This 'magic list' is the list of web sites which already link to one of your competitors!
For example, let's say the webmaster of Papa John's Pizza wanted to engage in a comprehensive link promotion campaign. He could spend days trying to locate different sites which would be interested in linking to a pizza company web page. Or he could run a Link Popularity report on one of his competitors (Dominos.com or PizzaHut.com) and find thousands of web sites who are related to 'pizza' in some way because they already link to a national pizza company.
Why it works
The list of sites which link to your competitors is extremely targeted. Since each of these sites already links to a competitor of yours, it is highly likely that...
1. These sites are relevant to your site.
2. They are willing to link to external sites in your field.
With this report in hand, you can quickly visit each of the sites (to verify that it is a quality, relevant sites), then introduce yourself to their webmaster and ask to be included on their site. In most cases, you will want to write a personalized message and mention that you noticed that they already link to sites in your field. This highly selective, personalized approach is one of the best possible ways to increase your site's link popularity.
Why approaching the right sites is critical....
1. Approaching the right types of sites will greatly improve your link request response rate. Webmasters who have an interest in your field are much more likely to be interested in opening and reading your link request letter. The majority of ignored or deleted link request letters are cookie-cutter messages sent to poorly selected sites. By selecting only specific pages which already contain very similar links, you will greatly increase the chance that your message will be opened and viewed favorably.
2. Relevant sites are much more likely to link to you. Targeting the right sites is the best possible way to increase the number of links to your site. If done properly, finding the perfect sites to approach will be a win-win situation for both your site and the sites you contact. Assuming you have a good site, you will be doing webmasters a favor by pointing out an extremely relevant site which may be of interest to their visitors. These webmasters are much more likely to link to your site and in many cases will thank you for taking the time to contact them.
3. Once they link to you, the visitors they send you will be more interested in your content. Since they are coming from a relevant site, these visitors are more likely to be interested in your content. They may perceive your site in a better light and even be more likely to do business with you since your site has been recommended (linked to) by another trusted site (as opposed to found via a banner ad or sponsored listing). Depending on the recommending site and the description of the link, you may find that these special types of visitors are much more profitable than your average visitor.
4. Increasing the number of relevant links to your web site can dramatically increase your search engine rankings. The major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Altavista) reward sites which have high link popularity. However, just getting hundreds of random web sites to link to you will not help your search engine rankings. The relevance of the sites linking to you is extremely important. By focusing exclusively on gaining links from relevant web sites, you will be giving yourself a tremendous advantage over sites who take a more scattered, less effective approach.
Stay one step ahead of your competition: By analyzing who links to them, you can also determine...
1. Are they currently engaging in a link promotion campaign?
2. Are they purchasing banner advertisements or sponsoring related web sites?
3. Have they submitted their site to industry specific directories and resources?
4. Who their affiliates and joint venture partners are.
5 . Are their customer's complaining about them?Use this information to gain new insight into your competition and give you ideas to increase your own on-line marketing efforts.
Conclusion
Being aware of who links to you competitors and using this information wisely can help you quickly build your link popularity. Sites which link to your competitors are far more likely to be relevant to your field, interested in your site and willing to link your site. Visiting and contacting these sites can dramatically increase traffic to your site and improve your search engine rankings.