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Linking analysis: Who is linking to you and why

Posted by Michael Martinez on September 26, 2007 in Intermediate SEO, Link Theory

One reason why a Web site may be showing a strong link profile is that it could have allies. Web site alliances are nothing new. They have been around since the Web began but quite often people who are new to search engine optimization assume that most links are obtained or exchanged rather than integrated into marketing plans. Based on their literature and comments in presentations, search engine designers don’t really understand how that works, either.

You can have two types of Web marketing plans: a partnership plan where two or more parties divide marketing tasks and go forward or a proprietary plan where you do it all yourself. Your proprietary plan can include alliances. The difference between an alliance and a partnership is that that partnership is formalized, usually through a contractual relationship; and Web marketing allies may be pursuing different goals.

A Web alliance provides mutual support and promotion. Web site A publishes content about Web site B and Web site B publishes content about Web site A. You might find a local business publishing information on its site about an upcoming festival and the festival publishing information on its site about the participating business. That kind of exchange of publishing courtesy becomes an alliance if both sites publish 2 or more articles about the other site. Just adding a business to a list of sponsors or vendors is not sufficient.

Web allies do not have to explicitly endorse each other. They can simply be sharing visitors and information. For example, specialty news sites devoted to entertainment topics can be very competitive. Nonetheless, it is customary for them to acknowledge each other when they report on each other’s scoops. On rare occasions, specialty news sites will exchange articles through guest editorials, guest blog posts, jointly-sponsored contests, etc. By watching a vertical for 1-2 years you’ll find the rivalries and the alliances.

Another reason why you may have a strong linking profile is that you’re popular. You could have a cute Web site, a funny Web site, a uniquely informative Web site, a highly opinionated Web site, etc. Whatever you do, you strike a nerve with a user community. People have good feelings about your site and they link to it willingly, freely, and openly. They don’t do it as the result of an event (that is link baiting). They do it because they found your site, liked what you do, and chose to recommend your site to other people.

Link baiting is the art of creating content that people link to. You don’t have to be artful or a link baiter in order to attract links. Link baiting tends to be artificial, market-oriented, designed to create buzz. Naturally link-healthy Web sites are just there, not doing anything special, Web 2.0, etc. I have many many link-healthy sites in the past couple of years that were plain as macaroni and cheese, simple as peanut butter, lacking images and Javascript. Why did people link to them? Because they liked the Web site owners. When your personality shows through your content, it will appeal to someone. Some personalities have broader appeal than others.

Sometimes an ugly Web site has content that is so compelling that even the news media will talk about it. For example, if you look for stolen cell phone in New York City you’ll find a site that is about as plain as plain gets. That site has several thousand links pointing to it.

The whole point of the page is just to rant about someone who would not return a missing cell phone. But the story became so intriguing and touched close to home for so many people that visitors actually helped track down who had the cell phone. Ultimately a couple of people were arrested after the New York City Police Department took a lot of heat from local media. The site received millions of visitors.

The lesson to be learned from sites like that is that ugly don’t hurt. Web 2.0 is irrelevant. And link bait isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be.

Sometimes, just being yourself is enough to attract attention and earn some link love. You don’t need to partner with anyone, you don’t need to buy anyone’s “marketing tools and services”, you don’t need to create faux rants or be immature and petty or run around the blogging community picking fights with people who don’t compliment you endlessly — you can just express yourself and get more links than the average business Web site. People will link to what they like, and you may find that an amateur costume designer site has hundreds more links than a professional costume designer site.

Professionals don’t pay nearly enough attention to the amateurs on the Web, but amateurs often out-perform professional Web sites in building market share and visibility. And the amateurs rarely make any money from their Web sites. They are just doing their thing, sharing their passion with people.

As many people in the SEO community know, you can build links through hostility. Although I’ve irritated more than a few people through the years, I have never sought links for myself or a client by being annoying. However, some people who are habitually antagonistic and critically abusive of other people (”toxic” in personality) are pretty good at getting other people to disagree with them AND link to them. It’s a method for building links but if you’re signature in the trade is to disagree with everyone, you had better be prepared to back up what you say with some credible links and resources. Don’t just go looking for fights.

When you’re looking at who links to a blog, ask yourself, “Why are people linking there?” Are they agreeing with what the blogger says? Are they disagreeing with the blogger? Do they link once and move on? Do they just add the link to a blogroll and never say anything? How a blogger links to a Web site says a lot about WHY s/he is linking to that site.

Self-promotional people are also good at building links. They do it naturally because they are constantly pushing themselves into other people’s faces. I’ve been self-promotional in the past but there are plenty of examples of people who are far more active in the process than I am. They do everything better than someone else, they don’t make the same mistakes as anyone else, and all you have to do is visit their Web site to see how good they truly are.

After all, Web sites don’t lie, do they? Just look at their backlinks. But don’t take too close a look or you’ll see the advertising and marketing copy surrounding their backlinks, you’ll see their blog and forum comments, you’ll see their archived email discussions where their signature links or self-embedded links are prominently featured on the Web. Self-promotional links pass PageRank but they rarely pass link anchor text. Why is that? Because the purpose of the self-promotional link is to get a link, not to build up link anchor text. The link itself may bring in traffic.

Self-promotional links come from the promoters, their affiliates, and their friends. The self-promotional links don’t add any value to the Web content they are part of but they help impress naive people who don’t know any better than to just look at backlink reports in Yahoo!. If you’re going to look at backlink reports, then take the time to browse the backlinks. Ask yourself, “Where do these links come from and why?”

Another reason a site may show a strong link profile is that it links freely to itself. Backlink reports usually don’t distinguish between internal links and external links. Now, there is no SEO reason to look only at external links when you’re doing competitive analysis. In fact, if you’re doing competitive analysis you WANT to look at internal links to find out what your competitors are doing for themselves.

A site with lots of content but weak internal linkage may be depending on external links or just the content to help its search results. If you intend to move in on that site’s rankings, you had better understand what options it has left to play. Is it fully extended through external and internal linkage or is there plenty of room for link development? Most sites become fully extended in the range of 250-500 links. They won’t get more than that unless they go out and buy sitewide links or form partnerships. But most sites don’t accumulate 250-500 links.

A site may also be part of a network of sites that link out to it. In fact, if you operate a commercial network with 10 sites that each have 1,000 pages you can give an 11th site 10,000 new links when you launch it. If you think there is a problem with that, keep in mind that search engine optimization is not the only way to grow traffic and visibility. You create brand value when you establish 10,000 links on pages that people visit. You may or may not suffer in the search engine indexes for a while. But as long as you get traffic, you’re doing good.

Some links may not help with search engine optimization, but if they drive qualified traffic, take the links. You cannot let search engine rankings and referrals be the standard by which you measure your Web marketing success. Some businesses will only achieve Web marketing success through paid advertising. If it costs you $1 million per month to advertise your site but you earn $1 million per month in profits, you have no reason to complain about not owning the organic search results.

So learning who doesn’t have links can also tell you something about a market, about the players in the market, and about where the money may be. Money chases money. People only invest (over the long term) in strategies that pay off. A market cannot sustain itself if there is no return on investment. Asking why a business site doesn’t have links pointing to it is as important as asking why links exist.

Link analysis doesn’t just deal with the links that are there. It also deals with the links that are not there. Why did a Web site that links out to many sites exclude one particular site? This blog, for example, has intentionally not linked to certain other SEO sites. Why? Is it because I see no value in those sites, because I feel they are not relevant to the topics I write about, or is it for a competitive reason — am I denying people link love because I don’t want to help them rank in search results?

I could, for example, provide link love for SEO Services, PPC Services, Search Engine Optimization Services, Search Engine Optimization SEO and other cool industry pet terms. But maybe I don’t want to play the link love game. Maybe I just want to talk about SEO theory. Maybe I just want to annoy people by not linking to them.

Understanding why people link to a particular site and who is linking to that site tells you a great deal about the stature of the site in its community. And understanding who refuses to link to a site and why they won’t link also tells you something.

And the fact that sites won’t link to each other within a community says something about the community itself. For example, what does it say about a Web site that includes many rarely updated blogs in its blogroll (NOTE: some of the blogs SEO Theory recognizes are not updated very often)? What does it say about a blog that hardly includes any other blogs in its blogroll? High prestige sites don’t have to link, but if they choose to link they may link for personal reasons (in fact, they probably all link for personal reasons) and the tight interlinkage or lack of it in a community says a great deal about the community.

Raw link counts won’t tell you much about links, but links will tell you a great deal about who is developing links, who is depending on links, who is popular, who is considered to be a resource, and how much visibility a site has earned or created. You can also use links to diagnose the health of a community. If you’re building a market you need to work with healthy communities or else you need to reinvigorate dying communities.

When you analyze links, you really need to analyze who is doing the linking and why. But don’t make assumptions. If you cannot see why someone is linking, don’t just assume that paid links are being deployed. There may be other reasons you cannot see. Too many people in the SEO community marry themselves to assumptions. When you’re analyzing link structures, you have to set aside everything you think is right about links and learn about the structures themselves. Only the links can teach you about the links. You cannot learn about links by reading SEO opinions.

Read other articles in this series:

1. Fundamental Principles for Link Analysis
2. What every good SEO should know about link analysis
3. Linking analysis: Who is linking to you and why
4. Link Analysis: Crunchy numbers and soft tallies