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Sphinn Home » Link Building
A Guide To Qualifying Link Prospects For Relevance, Value & Potentiality
Link Building News Source: http://searchengineland.com
Story Found By: vermasaurav 1125 Days ago
Category: Link Building
The core problem of link building—assuming you’ve maximized your site’s linkability—is not prospecting for sites that may potentially link to yours. The problem lies in rapidly identifying the link prospects whose links will provide the fastest and largest impact on your search marketing goals.
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from Garrett 1125 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Thanks for the Sphinn vermasaurav! I’d like to add that there’s also a downloadable worksheet we created for this article (a prize inside ;) that comes pre-programed with calculations that enable link builders to measure the relevance, value and potentiality of any link prospect.Try prospecting with that new SEOMoz tool (http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-finder/) and then qualify your link prospects using our worksheet :)G

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from vermasaurav 1125 Days ago #
Votes: 0

The pleasure is all mine. To be honest, the post deserved to be here.

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from linkmoses 1125 Days ago #
Votes: 0

You guys really are getting closer and closer to the elusive sweet spot. I have a series of spreadsheets and macros that I’ve used for going on ten years to evaluate large scale URLs, and I look forward to using yours as well. It’s amazing what you can learn when you know what to look for. At the same time, even when we know by analysis the exact 3,217 target sites that will be the most impactful for any given topic, that info is useless if the site seeking those links cannot earn those links by virtue of high merit content. The very nature of this approach makes the targets much tougher to get, and thus potentially more valuable. But it still circles right back to content. Knowing is only half the battle.-ew

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from Halfdeck 1125 Days ago #
Votes: 0

I wouldn’t recommend doing this manually. Use a scraper tool instead:"As you visit each link prospect, put a “1” in the appropriate column for that page’s value to your search marketing goals."Also I seriously object to anyone confusing Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) with PageRank. Sure, many people do it, but Toolbar PageRank and real (internal) PageRank - as we all know - are two different animals and using the same term for both just perpetrates the confusion.

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from Garrett 1124 Days ago #
Votes: 0

@linkmoses - hey Eric, thanks again for your comment - I responded at SEL :)@halfdeck - It’s highly tedious and less accurate to gather information for qualifying link prospects by hand. However, for link builders who haven’t created tools our process should help to process and qualify reasonably large sets of urls for faster and more efficient link building... so long as it’s interns/outsourcers putting all those 1s in the columns ;)We use scrapers/crawlers to gather over 70 points of data per link prospect, on link prospect sets of 150k+ urls. At that scale, well, yeah. Gotta keep it automated.Can you link to methods/metrics for measuring real internal PageRank?G

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from Halfdeck 1124 Days ago #
Votes: 0

"However, for link builders who haven’t created tools our process should help to process and qualify reasonably large sets of urls"Even if you outsource the job, it’ll take hours to process thousands of urls manually. In that sense your post comes off as a tease :) Its trivial to code a scraper that does what you’re talking about and then some (e.g. identify site type..blog/forum/directory etc, retrieve whois, scrape multiple domains and cross reference their IPs to discover networks and alliances, scan on-page text for negative signals like "link exchange", or in the case of RE sites detect resource pages with links to multiple states, scrape + process robots.txt disallows and META NOINDEX, score page quality by calculating URL spamminess...)."Can you link to methods/metrics for measuring real internal PageRank?"There’s no accurate metric to gauge internal PageRank. TBPR in general is a decent metric as long as you don’t take it too seriously. Other metrics that will give you a clue are cache dates and crawl frequency, since Googlebot’s crawl behavior is closely tied to PageRank.

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from Garrett 1124 Days ago #
Votes: 0

Trivial to code a scraper to capture all that data? Now who’s teasing? ;) Especially when you’re working at large scale... I’m not saying it’s rocket science of course, but it’s certainly not trivial.We’ve found that TBPR is useful in aggregate - especially alongside relevance metrics.Very interesting thoughts re: cache dates and crawl frequency. These dates could certainly add a nice layer of insight into a site’s value within a set of link prospects. If we were to add something like this to the by-hand worksheet we already made, what do you think it should look like so that curious SEOs could try it themselves?G

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from Halfdeck 1124 Days ago #
Votes: 0

"it’s certainly not trivial."I’ve built one; its not that hard and I’m no code guru."We’ve found that TBPR is useful in aggregate"Yes home page TBPR, in general, is useful in filtering out spam, though when you’re dealing with thousands of domains you may still end up with more than a few spammy TBPR 5+ sites."Very interesting thoughts re: cache dates and crawl frequency."Yeah those ideas have been floating around since Google removed the supplemental results label in SERPs. Main difference between supp and main urls is PageRank. One major difference in their treatment used to be cache freshness. Supplemental pages’ caches were refreshed every "few" months, while pages in the main index were revisted and cached way more frequently. Page freshness etc are also a factor - but the jist of it is Google tends to revisit pages it deems more important more often. For example, Chicagotribune’s home page is crawled every 5 minutes.

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