Links are for life, not just for SEO. That is to say – knowledge and insight into the link profile of a URL, or the ability to manipulate it, can help you influence your world way beyond search.
If you’ve ever managed programmers (or been a programmer yourself) you’ll know how easy it is to get into “programming mode” when you wrestle with a problem and try to build the best thing you can, without regard to the real world marketing problem that you are trying to address. In a similar vein, Marketers tend to think about links as “something that affects SEO”. Here’s 5 practical reasons for marketers analysing links beyond search.
1: Do you trust this page or site?
There used to be many tools that showed PageRank in your toolbar and we used PageRank intuitively to get a sense of how much we trusted the page. These days, looking up PageRank on the fly is harder than it used to be as Google clamps down on automated lookups – but you can still to it, using the Optfirst extension available inChrome and Firefox.
However, the publicly available value of PageRank is only a number between 0-10 and is very rarely updated publicly by Google – maybe twice a year. There are now other metrics, which are more granular than the 0-10 value that PageRank offers. The two most well known are Majestic SEO’s Flow Metrics® and SEOMoz’s Moz Metrics. Both are available in browser extensions. The Majestic SEO Chrome extension will tell you instantly the Trust Flow in a score or 0-100 and the Citation Flow in a score of 0-100. These are different algorithms to PageRank, but are still iterative in nature and give excellent initial indications as to whether you might trust a page or whether it was created yesterday just with a view to scamming you.
2: Should you consider advertising on this site?
MajesticSEO’s Flow Metrics and SEOMoz’s MozMetrics are extremely helpful in understanding whether you should consider any advertising or sponsorship relationship with a site. If you are like me, you get people on a regular basis tracking you down trying to pitch their business model with your site – claiming to have the ideal audience for your business. The headline numbers will give you some idea as to how much advertising on a page might be worth – but actually visiting the strongest of those links will give you an excellent feel for the types of people coming to the site and talking about the site. Indeed – there may be some merit in using Majestic’s Trust Flow score to create a dollar value as to how much you might bid or pay for advertising on any given page or site, as it is more qualitative that just visitor counts, link counts or referring domain counts alone.
3: Understand the history of any business
Looking at the way in which a website has developed links over time give an indication as to not only the age of the business, but the strength of the business. This is easy to see for free using Majestic’s free link history charts. In particular – when looking at a site, looking at the referring domain pattern, not the referring link pattern, because site wide links over time can cause the latter chart to appear more erratic than the business deserves. In addition, switching the chart to a cumulative one will show you how a business has built over time.
4: Find other websites in a group
Often, one business represents its business through many brands. Usually there will be links of some sort between the brands – but even if there aren’t, they often all reside on the same server or – in the case of large companies – the same data center and therefore the some IP range. One of the cool things that you can do for free on Majestic is see what domains reside on a given IP number or range, simply by looking at the links into that IP number. Other systems do this as well. For example Domaintools.com.
5: Find the REAL influencers in any vertical
We all know that Lee Odden is influential in search, because we are reading his blog right now! (unless you are reading a scraped version, which is even more of a testament to his influence that someone should take the trouble to steal his content). But if you knew nothing about the industry, could links help to find the main influencers?
At least two companies that I know of have invested in being able to find these people through back link analysis. Linkdex and CognitiveSEO both are able to take link data wholesale, then parse the link URLs to see what type of pages and links these are. They both do a pretty good job of finding links embedded particularly in BLOG content. If the blog pages themselves are influential (again we are back to Flow Metrics® or Page Rank® to see this) then we have ourselves an influential blogger for that vertical.
Now you have 5 useful ways to use web page link data for purposes that range from determining advertising value to discovering influencers for blogger relations and outreach. How are you using link analysis and tracking tools outside of search engine optimization?