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Link Popularity
Frequently Asked Questions
Q.
Why is Link Popularity important?
A. Link Popularity
is important to several groups for different reasons.
Link Popularity (a concept mostly pioneered by Google)
is important to the major search engines because it
provides one of the strongest methods available for
delivering highly relevant search results. If a search
engine cannot deliver useful and relevant information
to its users, those users will find another search
engine.
For the website owner or operator, Link Popularity
becomes a strategy or tactic that can be used to boost
site referrals and develop new online relationships.
Market researchers and analysts are interested in
Link Popularity because it provides a real-time marketing
performance metric that is based on an index of independent
and publicly available data sources (i.e. Google,
FAST, Alta Vista, AOL, MSN, HotBot).
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Q.
Are all links created equal?
A. No. The search
engines can look at the source of a link and weight
it differently from others. For instance, a link to
your site from CNN.com is better than a link from
SomeDumbSite.com (in theory). So, if two sites are
equal in every respect except that one has a link
to it from the home page of CNN.com, and the other
site has a link from SomeDumbSite.com, the first site
will perform better for relevant keyword searches.
If you've had your site posted to thousands of bogus
link farms (sites designed to artificially inflate
Link Popularity) don't hold your breath. Bottom line:
attain as many relevant and credible links as possible
and don't count on shortcuts.
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Q.
What is the timeframe used by Marketleap to capture
Link Popularity data?
A. The answer
is two fold. Link Popularity on all user submitted
URLs is reported by the search engines in real-time.
Whereas the benchmarking link popularity data for
our report is collected every 14 days. Check your
link popularity at least once a month and establish
a trend over time to measure your overall success
and benchmark your competitors.
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Q.
Each time I check my site I get a different number.
Why?
A. The results
that are reported by Marketleap are taken directly
from the search engines. The number reported from
a search engine may fluctuate for any number of reasons
(i.e. rapidly changing indexes running on multiple
server farms). Checking your link popularity a few
times in a row will quickly show you that the results
tend to fall in a narrow range. Check your link popularity
at least once a month and establish a trend over time
to measure your overall success and benchmark your
competitors.
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Q.
How do I interpret my Link Popularity score?
A. Your Link
Popularity score should be looked at in two respects:
1) How do you compare to your direct competitors and
others in the same keyword space? This will give you
a sense of how visible you are within your online
market. 2) Is your Link Popularity score growing or
shrinking over time? If it isn't growing, this
will help you understand that you must perform additional
marketing in order to expose yourself to a wider audience.
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Q.
How can I increase my Link Popularity?
A. Link Popularity
can be increased by implementing a variety of tools
and techniques, such as a thorough site submission
to all major relevant search engines and directories
(for starters), link letter campaigns, viral marketing
applications, and more great content with an ongoing
search engine optimization strategy.
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Q.
Why does MSN Search report 0 link popularity? I know
there are more than this!
A. Unfortunately,
MSN Web Search does not support hyphens in linkdomain
searches...
a URL like "www.some-domain.com" will result
in 0 links from MSN Web search. Of course this does
not necessarily mean that there are no pages linking
to you. Until MSN Web Search can support hyphenated
linkdomain searches, the Marketleap Visibility Index
cannot support them.
You can try an "Advanced" search at http://search.msn.com/advanced.asp...
enter your domain like www.some-domain.com, Select
"Links to URL" from the drop down box, then
check the "stemming" check box. Your search
will produce the closest thing possible to a link
popularity search. NOTE that the resulting links may
not actually contain links to your URL... they may
only contain a textual reference of your domain which
is not considered "link popularity".
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Q.
Why does Google return 0 or very low link popularity?
I know there are more than this!
A. Linkdomain
searches at Google work better using the "www."
portion of the domain name that you are reporting
on. Google will many times return 0, or a lower value
if you only submit the second level domain portion
of the domain name. Include the "www." portion
of your domain name (if applicable) for an accurate
link popularity report from Google.
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Q.
What is the difference between Link Popularity and
Search Saturation? The numbers look very different.
A. Link
popularity refers to the number of pages that contain
a link to your domain. So using our example, Marketleap.com
would have about 3,704 web pages that contain a link
to www.marketleap.com and www.coke.com would have
about 29,219 pages with a link pointing to that domain.
This does not reflect ranking.
Search Engine Saturation represents
the number of pages from a domain name indexed by
the search engines. Analyzing the report you build
using Marketleap's tools will show how many
of your pages are currently available to be searched
in 5 of the leading search engines (Fast, AltaVista,
Google, Hotbot, Northern Light). As an example, www.marketleap.com
has about 455 pages indexed between the 5 engines
while www.coke.com has about 36 pages indexed.
The results of the SE Index do not reflect ranking,
but rather the number of available pages from a domain
that can potentially be part of the results of a related
search.
Having a high link popularity number (assuming those
pages linking to you are quality sites) will help
your ranking with search engines like Google. A high
index count means that you have more pages available
for the engines to consider when building its search
results. The two numbers are not tied together. They
are both unique ways to understand your availability
and popularity online.
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