Monday, May 20, 2013

Tips to Analyze Link Data

Link Data analysis can be divided into three sections which allows us to easily understand and evaluate it. Following are the three sections in link data analysis:
  1. How to get link Data
  2. How to analyze the Link Data
  3. How to solve the problems that arise in Link Data analysis

How to get Link Data:

To get Link we have to take help of tools which provide us with Link data. Following are some of the user-friendly tools which give us link data quite straight forward:
  • Google Webmaster Tools
  • Bing's Webmaster Tools
  • ahrefs
  • SEO Moz
  • Link Research Tools
  • Majestic SEO

How to Analyze the Link Data:

When we are choosing tools to analyze link data we need to check whether this tools give information on:
  • Page of their Url that links to our website
  • Page the URL links to on our site
  • What anchor text is used in linking
  • Whether the link used for linking is no-follow or do-follow
  • Check whether the link is text link or image link (this can be optional)
Following are the basic four steps that we need to follow when checking back link profile:

1. Need to check Anchor Percentages in backlinks:

One of the most important steps we need to follow is that we have to check percentage of anchors in backlinks.
  • Brand / URL anchors: Brand or URL anchors are the terms which are used as the anchor text.
    Example: “Altius Cart” or “altiuscart.com”
  • Money Anchors: Money anchors are the terms that are used in links which help in ranking.
    Example: “Cell Phones”
  • Compound Anchors: Compound anchors are a combination of both Brand and Money anchors.
    Example: “Cell Phones from Altius Cart”
  • Other Anchors: Any other anchors which are left over.
These percentages just help us to make our plans, but not as the one and only way we formulate them.

2. Next Step is to have a look at ratio of Home page links to Deep page links:

Competitive analysis just shows us what the standard was for the industry. There are the instances where in a home page will have few links while inner pages will have tons of links linking to it and the same will go with the competitors in the niche. In some cases home page may get tons of links while inner pages may barely get some good ones.

It is our responsibility to check the ratios and see whether we differ substantially from those of our competitors. To check these ratios we need to make a list of linked-pages on the site and compare this list with the ratio of deep links to list of links to the home-page.

By these results we can conclude that if we rank low in deep links compared to our competitors then we need to work on that. If we rank in the same way or higher than competitors then we can continue with the techniques what we are doing now.

3.Next Step is to perform Geo-location analysis:

Performing geo-location analysis helps us in identifying potential issues. From link analysis tools we can get information on Geo-location regarding top-level domain, hosting location, country popularity or other tabs. This gives the information we need.

This Geo-location analysis helps us in knowing from which part of the world do we get links from and are we able to get links from the location we target. This information will be valuable if we are targeting users for country specific searches.

4. At last we need to check links from Site wides:

Site wide links can be completely fine or can also be spammy. To calculate sitewides we can simply calculate by dividing number of referring domains to the total number of backlinks. After calculating percentage of sitewides if it is too high then we can go on considering non-sitewides so that percentage gets diluted.

If bulk links are from sitewides there are chances that we may encounter a problem. Because many penalized profiles will have spam links from sitewides on network blogs.

How to solve the problems that arise in Link Data analysis:

None of the tools can exactly figure out what benefits do we get from a link. These tools just use metrics that are available and give approximate determinations based on those numbers which are mostly accurate but not in all cases.

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