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The Benefits of Monitoring Link Popularity and Quality

Links from other websites are one of the most important ingredients in obtaining and keeping high organic search engine rankings.

Most web site owners know that the number of links pointing to your site (link popularity) is very important. However, often the source of these links (link quality) is overlooked..

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That is why it is essential for every web site owner to continually monitor both link popularity and link quality. Using a tool such as the Checker and Link Quality Checker from Elixir Systems will give you the necessary statistics on your links and your competitor's links.

Here are some of the statistics you should monitor:

Total Inbound Links to your Home Page

Most sites linking to you will be to your home page. This statistic should show the total links both including and excluding internal links.

Total Inbound Links to Your Whole Site

You should know the total amount of links going to you whole site. This is a good figure to compare with competitor sites.

Quantity of Deep Links

These are links to pages other than the home page. These links are a valuable indicator of the quality of a site. Bought links tend to go to the home page whereas organically grown links tend to go to internal pages. These internal pages get a boost from these offsite links and are an often overlooked by web site owners.

Deep Linking Percentage

The deep link percentage is the number of deep links as a total of the overall links. This generally ranges from 5% to over 80%. Having a deep link percentage of over 30% appears to indicate a nicely linked site. This is the minimum you should strive for.

Yahoo Directory

Does your site have a link from the Yahoo Directory? One of the most important directories on the internet currently is the Yahoo directory. The Yahoo directory is seen as a trusted link and is worth more than links from most other sites. The nice thing about Yahoo is you can get a link fairly easily for the price of submission. Once in the Yahoo directory it’s not uncommon to see 40 or more links listed here as your site will be listed in all English language Yahoo directories i.e. Singapore, India, UK, Ireland, etc.

DMOZ Directory

The other important directory is the DMOZ directory. This directory is used by Google. Unfortunately it is currently extremely difficult to get into DMOZ.

Links From .gov and .edu Sites

Links from .gov sites and .edu sites are very valuable. These sites carry a harder level of entry and more importance.

Pages Indexed

If you do not have inbound links the search engines cannot index your site. However, there may be other technical reasons why your site is not being indexed by one or more of the search engines. Therefore you should monitor how many of your site pages are indexed by each of the three major search engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN. In addition you should look out for the search engines indexing both the www.sitename.com and sitename.com sites which can cause duplicate content issues.

Elixir Systems have a free Link Popularity Checker and Link Quality Assessment Tool that you can use to monitor the links to your website. This tool will send you a weekly email with all your link statistics. You can access the tool at: http://www.elixirsystems.com/tools/linkpopularity.php

Dylan Downhill and James Peggie

You can comment on this article at the Elixir Systems Search Blog.

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