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Link Tracking and Verification
By HHI Golf Guy | April 19, 2006
Yes - it’s been a while since I posted here. We have been EXTREMELY busy in 2006 with many new accounts as well as working on many other things including a possible partnership with a major MLS provider.
One of the most often overlooked aspects of link building campaigns is web link maintenance. You didn’t really think that you could find hundreds of link partners and then forget about them, did you?
The first step is to make sure that keep keep organized records of your links. You can do this using a database program (we have a custom program that we wrote in MS Access) or even a simple Excel spreadsheet to keep track of your link information.
Now you might be asking yourself, “What about my automatic link finding software? Can’t I use that to track my links?” My personal opinion about link building software is that they are all junk and not worth your time, effort, or money. If you read the previous blog entries on link building, then you should be beginning to understand that quality links are more important than quantity links. I have yet to see automated link building software that can properly qualify a quality web site. Think of it this way - how many times have you heard someone or read in a forum complaining that they are ranked #22 for their major search phrase even though they have 5,000 links to their web site and the guy at #1 has only 700 links? Guess who went after quality over quantity?
OK - back on topic. You should keep track of the domain where your link is coming from, the page where your link is located, the date you submitted the request for the link, and extra work area to check off your bi-monthly link verification.
Verifying links? You bet! Remember, although your site cannot be penalized for other sites linking to you, your site can start slipping in the rankings if you link out to “bad neighborhoods”. You should make a habit of checking all of your outbound links at least every other month to see if those partner sites have been penalized in Yahoo, MSN, and especially Google. Just run a site:www.linkeddomain.com check in each of the search engines to make sure their pages are still in the search engine index.
You should also check to make sure that your link is still on your link partner’s web site. There is another well know real estate SEO company that has some very slimy link habits. Their link lackeys send out thousands of link trade requests each month. You check their site and it looks good, so you exchange links. But check the site again in 3-6 months to verify your link is still there and *POOF* - your link is missing. This is their way of obtaining one-way links to their sites.
I have caught this company doing this on multiple occasions, and each time they give me a lame excuse (we changed the navigation structure to the site, we updated the web design, etc.). But here’s the ironic part: one of their link builders actually posted a comment on their own forum about doing this. He said he was kidding - but I think not.
This same company has another slimy tactic that they employ to try and get one way links. Instead of deleting old link pages, they leave them orphaned on the server then build new link pages with select partners. By orphaned pages I mean that there is no way to navigate to these pages from the home page. These old link pages link to each other, but not to the active pages in the site.
What this means is that even though these pages are still on the server, the search engines will drop these pages when they can no longer find them. Once these pages are dropped from the search engine index, you lose credit for that link. Meanwhile, this slimy company builds more one way links to their site.
Check your links, make sure the pages are active, and make sure that you can navigate to the page that your link is on.
In one of my next posts I’ll discuss other deceptive link trading practices.
Topics: General SEO |
One Response to “Link Tracking and Verification”
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April 23rd, 2006 at 3:02 am
Thanks for the info.
I use a tool to manage my links, and yes, I do check them periodically. I wasn’t aware of the “orphan pages” but that explains why sometimes the tool finds the links, but I can not find them when I search the sites.
I will re-check everything now though!