Tracking External Followed Inbound Links - Are We Getting Fooled?
-
This question is not about how to use SEOMOZ Link tools. It's about the numbers themselves and how their fluctuations are causing confidence issues....
My client wants to track inbound followed links over time. But as I understand it, this number will vary depending on the Linkscape crawling success (or even outages or partial crawls.) In the past few reports, we've had wild fluctuations which have made them very nervous.
If my client wants to track inbound followed links over time, what SEOMOZ metric should we use for the most reliable progress checks?
-
Most SEOs don't count raw links, exactly because the numbers vary wildly no matter what index you use, and also because most of the Internet is made up of "junk" links that disappear off the link graph every few months.
It's estimated that 60% of the web disappears every year. The reason for this is that much of the web is auto-generated by bots, auto-blogs, low quality aggregators and just plain spam. You often don't see many of these links because the search engines tend to filter them out indexes like Mozscape tend to ignore them as they don't influence rankings.
That said, low quality and transient links do make their way into the various indexes, including Google's. They don't count much for rankings or traffic, and they are as likely to disappear as they are to appear.
Even if the numbers were to stabilize, raw link counts tell you nothing about the value of the links. One good link can outweigh 10,000 no value links. And 100 bad links can actually hurt you.
For this reason, it's usually better to use metrics link DomainAuthority and MozTrust to gauge link building success, as well as gains in traffic and rankings.
Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
-
This is a B2B client, selling services in the $20M US range. SEO attribution can be a challenge because of the way due diligence gets conducted.
In addition to traffic, we measure several stages of the conversion funnel and do lead scoring attribution on the CRM. But, in progress meetings, I need to discuss results of SEO groundwork between observable events such as ranking changes (they are top 5 in hyper competitive phrases with some powerful uncumbants.)
Inbound followed links seemed to be one good metric to report on. I was using Linkscape for this but may need to change my approach.
-
I realise that this isn't quite the answer you were looking for, but perhaps trying to explain to the client that the number of inbound links isn't the best way to keep track of what you're doing? I know that personally I used to keep track of all the links I was building but after a while I realised it was a bit pointless, the only things that I really care about are conversions (and money coming in), and then traffic and number of terms driving that traffic (I try and keep things simple).
Might make your life a bit easier if you're not reliant on a third party number to keep him happy and you can show the end result of all your work is conversions, traffic, rankings etc?
Otherwise as mentioned above, I'd take a look at Majestic to show the numbers going up.
-
Yes thanks. The issue is not the functionality of reporting but the numbers themselves. +/- 2000 link variations between weekly runs is not okay and freaks out my clients. I'm sure we have not had that much change in link numbers.
I do think I need a 2nd tool to cross reference to. Majestic is a good one to consider.
Please, everyone keep ideas coming.
-
Hmm... I think you can have an inbound link report run at certain intervals and emailed out. Then you can do a comparison over time. You might also look into something like MajesticSEO which has a historic backlink tool. Very helpful and very credible.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Unsolved How many sites can I track with one subscription?
Hello, We are currently a MozPro medium member and we are tracking amlrightsource.com but we have other sites we'd like to track as well. Wondering if we can track more sites with this subscription?
Moz Pro | | KassandraSharr0 -
Link report that is broken down by C Block?
I've tried to do this in the advanced reports are of Moz, but to no avail. I just want to be able to see all the links (and anchor text would be nice too) for each CBlock.
Moz Pro | | DeluxeCorp0 -
To Many Links on site
I've had an issue with to many links on the site. My drop down menu, secondary footer and footer. The report told me that I had 253 links on each page. I then programmed my secondary footer to dynamic and ran a crawl and my links reduced accordingly to 201. Then turned the footer into dynamic and ran a crawl with my links increasing to 1500. This also happened between each phase but en went away. Oddly enough, my domain authority increased as well as other factors in the crawl report. This too many links thing is driving me crazy. Please provide some guidance.
Moz Pro | | CHADHARRIS0 -
How do I get a link in my blog bio signature on my Youmoz posts?
I've done several Youmoz posts and only recently noticed for some reason that other authors have included author links and links to their websites in their bio section at the end. I edited mine with a full URL but it only shows up as text. No editor there when you edit your profile so no way of adding a link. Anyone know how this is done?
Moz Pro | | DanDeceuster0 -
Too many on-page links
one of my SEOmoz pro campaigns has given me the warning: Too many on-page links and the page in question is my html sitemap. How do i resolve this because I obviously need my sitemap. How do i get around this?
Moz Pro | | CompleteOffice1 -
What is the difference between followed/no followed/ internal/ external links? And how do i improve them?
Am on a beginner level of SEO and as a pro member when i ran a report for my site i found some basic terms used. Can anyone please let me know what exactly is the difference between these terms and how important are they and how do i improve them?. or please let me know a source to find out.
Moz Pro | | NikhilM0 -
Reg. internal followed links
Our site is new. So far we have a 534 pages. Our competitors have around 5000. I'm working on building more, but that's a lot of catching up. The report says we have only 174 internal followed links. Why is that? I have all links set in the site to be nofollow links, but not the inside links. I also have lots of landing pages, which are not added to the main menu, obviously. But the the main menu shows up on all landing pages. Just wondering if either the nofollow has anything to do with it or the landing pages set up, or the numbers are accurate. Any ideas? Thanks!
Moz Pro | | FinanceSite0 -
Trying to understand how a website is getting higher than me with less links
Hi i am new to seo and trying to teach myself the best way to improve a site and the best way to use the tools on seomoz. The problem i have is. i am working on a page at the moment on a site. the page is called weight loss hypnotherapy http://www.clairehegarty.co.uk/weight-loss-hypnotherapy and i have around 130 links going to the page where as a site which is much higher than me in google has only around 5 links. I cannot understand with being new to seo how this can happen, can anyone please explain what i need to do to improve my ranking please. here is the site i am talking about that is higher than me www.weightlosshypnotherapy.co.uk/ any help would be great can anyone also give me a good example of a page before it has been optimised and a page after it has had this done.
Moz Pro | | ClaireH-1848860