279 replies to this topic

[webkid_san]

I might be wrong but "backlink" option I use from the google toolbar doesnot necessarily give me right numbers ... is there a command I can use to get exact numbers

[mcanerin]

One more than whoever is in the top position

Actually, although that's a joke, there is a strong element of truth to it.

The number (and more importantly, quality) of links necessary, all other things being equal (and they rarely are) is dependent on the number of links your competition has, not an actual number.

Think of it as a race. The speed necessary to win is not an actual number in MPH (Km/H) but rather the speed of the lead vehical + 1, for example.

For reference, if you are using PR to measure link quality (not a good idea as I write this because the Toolbar is 3+ months out of date) you would not only look at the number of links, but also their quality.

To use a Google-centric example

CODE

PR            Aprox PR 1
              Links Needed
1              1
2              8
3              64
4              512
5              4096
6              32,768
7              262,144
8              2,097,152
9              16,777,216
10             134,217,728

Obviously, it's hard to do this, so instead of trying to get 4096 PR1 links to get a PR of 5, it's FAR easier to get 8 PR 4 links, which in turn represent 4096 PR 1 links.

Now, this is horribly oversimplified in order to be clear. Take from this the general idea, not the actual numbers. Additionally, this example assumes that each PR 1 page only has ONE link on it and is therefore passing on all of its PR to one place. That almost never happens. most pages have at least ten links, so you would have to multiply the numbers above by 10 in order to get close.

The second thing to notice is that if you get a PR 6 site to link to your site, it would only take 2 or three to get your PR 5, instead of the thousands necessary to do it from the low PR sites to get a higher PR.

And remember, only Google cares about PR, the remaining 65% of the market uses other methods, and Google and Yahoo only share about 30% of the links they know about with each other, since they crawl differently, so you can't count on a high PR (representing links) helping you with Yahoo for more than about 30% of it.

Ian

[mcanerin]

Wow - several people posted while I was typing that last post, sorry.

ian

[Presentationrentals]

Hey ian,

I’m not trying to argue semantics and I understand you were using the numbers as an example only. I’m asking you to verify something I read elsewhere.

A page all alone, say floating in cyber space but indexed by google (don’t ask me how it got indexed since it has no inbound links, were talking theory here only) and google did a PR update would be a PR1, right? Assume this page has no inbound links and is under no penalty.

Per your graph a page would need a PR1 site to point to it to get the first PR1 rank. This seems one off from what I had understood about the actual theory behind hypertext-induced topic selection.

Massimo Marchiori first introduced The concept of using hyperlinks to improve information retrieval on the internet in his 1997 paper "The Quest for Correct Information Retrieval: Hyper Search Engines"

Jon Kleinberg later formalized this in his 1998 pager titles "Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment" now referred to as HIST (hypertext-induced topic selection).

Larry Page and Sergey Brin (Googles founders) made multiple references to Marchiori's and Kleinberg's papers in The Anatomy of a large-scale hypertext search engine" where they launched the misspelled google.stanford.edu

Under this theory the only way to have a page below the number of 1 was by penalizing the site. The scale was a 10 point scale, if you include 0 that would make the scale 11.

The quasi rock band Spinal Tap uses equipment that goes to 11 but the hypertext-induced topic selection scale does not.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

[mcanerin]

The last I heard, the PR for a stand alone page was in the vicinity of 0.15, actually, and the scale is 8.14 rather than 8.

Be aware that there is every possibliity that this has been changed since I last heard

Additionally, I believe some links pass on less PR than other - for example, I believe that a content link will pass on more PR than a Nav or footer link (I can't prove it yet, but I've seen a lot of examples where this appears to be the case).

In reality, the bottom ot the PR scale is 0, and one page by itself (PR .15) would get rounded to 0 on the toolbar and directory. But I figured that if I put a 0 there it would REALLY confuse people

I suspect the real scale is closer to a range of 0.01 to 10.00, or even 10.99 (though that would be strange, coming from an engineer) It could be anything, but I think that's the simplest scale that fits the results we see (Occams Razor).

Ian

[Presentationrentals]

Hey Ina,

Thank you for the reply.

Again, looking at this from the standpoint of theory only, the scale must go beyond 10. It may be as little over at 10.00000000000000000001 or 10.99999, I don’t know but if the scale is one that prioritizes the importance of each site and then ranks them top to bottom and the scale only went to 10 then only one site would have a PR = 10. Google, MSN and Yahoo at least each have a PR=10. Their may be more.

Since no site has a PR=11 the scale must end somewhere between 10.00000000000000001 and 10.9999999999999999999999

[Diniz]

The freeware Link Popularity Check V3.0 is now available.
http://www.checkyour...popularity.com/

[ttw]

I have used a variety of services to determine Link Popularity (excluding internal links from the client's own site) and I see a range of formulas used. So I have tried to come up with my own.

Please let me know if these will provide the best available data.

Google link:www.yourdomain.com
Yahoo linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com
MSN linkdomain:www.unify.com -site:www.yourdomain.com
AllTheWeb link:www.yourdomain.com -domain:www.yourdomain.com
AltaVista link:www.yourdomain.com -site:www.yourdomain.com
HotBot linkdomain:www.yourdomain.com
Teoma links:http://www.yourdomain.com
AOL link:www.yourdomain.com

[webkid_san]

I was reading it earlier that checking backlinks through the backward links available on the google toolbar is not the best way ... can some one guide me as to whats the bestway of doing that ...

thanks

[Michael]

try using "linkdomain: www.yoursite.com" in MSN

OR

try using "linkdomain: www.yoursite.com" in Yahoo!

Edited by Michael, 25 October 2004 - 02:26 PM.

[Michael]

Regarding Google Backlinks

There is a emerging consesus that Google is now tracking the age of inbound links - which may account for why the google backlink tool is not showing all the site linking to yours.

In other words, Google may have recorded the backlinks, but you won't be getting credit for them until they reach "maturity".

There are those who would say this is nonsense, and I don't work for Google, so make what you will of this post.

- Michael

[sdavis]

Hey everybody,

I currently use webceo to count backlinks. However their newest upgrade doesn't show me which sites have backlinks to my site like the previous version did. It just shows me a link total. IMO a very bad upgrade. So I would like to find a new tool that is relatively accurate to show me which sites have backlinks to my site. I would like to be able to see which search engines have what links found.

Thanks for your help! Oh, and as always, the cheaper/free the better.

Thanks,
SDavis

[webkid_san]

what do u mean when you say it has reached "maturity"

[Michael]

What I mean is as follows:

===================
PURE SPECULATION
===================

There is some evidence to suggest that Google is now tracking the date at which a link begins pointing to your site in an effort to stop search engine spammers getting high rankings in extraordinarily short periods of time. With that in mind, they are withholding the "vote" an inbound link presents, until the link itself "ages". Once the link reaches its critical "age" (i.e. it matures), your site will get credit for it in terms of a backlink, or at least in terms of its relevance helping your site rank in the SERPs.

I hope that helps - again, I am not certain this is what is going on, but a growing number of cases are behaving like this.

- Michael

[raj_freind]

Count your backlinks in google or other search engine:

Exp:
link:www.yourdomainname.com will return you no: of website.

link: www.yourdomainname.com will return you no: of webpages.

"www.+yourdomainname.+com" will return you no: of pages.