65 replies to this topic

[kevs]

I'm noticing people at top of an important search term of mine that have weak backlinks.
What deal with this, any news?

Also, what about the age of site? Do the older more established sited get better SEO?
Wondering if Google has been tossing this aside too.

[Jill]

They definitely have not tossed aside backlinks as a key piece of the algorithm.

Problem is there's no good way to see the backlinks of a site.

[PatrickGer]

They definitely have not tossed aside backlinks as a key piece of the algorithm.

Problem is there's no good way to see the backlinks of a site.

Do you not think yahoo site explorer or majestic SEO's tool are at l east a decent approximation of the backlinks a site has (in Google)? (Ive thought that so far, but might be wrong)

[Jill]

Yahoo Site Explorer is not since it shows ads as links, and nofollowed links as links. I haven't really tried Majestic.

[PatrickGer]

Yahoo Site Explorer is not since it shows ads as links, and nofollowed links as links. I haven't really tried Majestic.

INteresting, I didnt know that and never heard it mentioned before, actually!

In other words site explorer's results are inflated (or is there more to it, and they might also not count a bunch of other links,etc.)?

[Michael Martinez]

INteresting, I didnt know that and never heard it mentioned before, actually!

In other words site explorer's results are inflated (or is there more to it, and they might also not count a bunch of other links,etc.)?

Yahoo! Site Explorer (and all third-party link analysis tools) can only provide limited information. It's good for snapshot analysis so that you can determine if a site has any links, a lot of links, probable bad links, probable good links. Any tool that shows you a list of links will tell you that much.

If, however, you try to take that information and apply it to what ANOTHER service is doing -- you're wasting your time. Hence, using Yahoo! Site Explorer, Majestic SEO, Linkscape, or other tools to understand what Google or Bing know about or make of links is a waste of time. Those tools don't know anything about which links Google and Bing have crawled, are allowing to pass value, etc.

[kevs]

Micheal, that's pretty harsh no? Majestic claim to be Yahoo on steriods. They seem to put a lot of time into their crawls and data.
And even Yahoo, it seems to show a heck of a lot of backlinks...

[PatrickGer]

just deleted my post to put it slightly more briefly :-)

If I want to look at the links displayed in google for www.highrankings.com I see 358(or so). In yahoo/majesticseo I see many, many more.

At the end of the day, we can only estimate/gauge what's going on with the link profile of a certain website (in the algorithm of a certain search engine). Considering the effort of estimating it is a few seconds/minutes, it seems to be a better idea to do it than to completely ignore it (for one's ROI).

Now the question is:

If you want to rank in Google, is there a better way than to look at the links yahoo, majesticSEO,etc. knows about?

How would you go about doing that, would you preferrably look at the links Google shows to you?

It seems to come down to either

a)taking links from the same service which is less willing to share information about what they know about links with you (considering google's resources it'd be a joke if they sucked so bad at link discovery in comparison to majestic/yahoo)

b)taking links from another service that is more willing to share the information on what they know about link profiles with you.

Do you have any evidence that relying on another service/other services that are more willing to show what *they* know about backlink profiles...is worse for understanding whats going on in Google

than to

Go with google's information (who are less willing to show you what they know)?

Looking at nothing but the facts, I could only speculate which would give me the better estimation/lower margin of error.

How do you go about it?/Do you know of a better way?

Edited by PatrickGer, 12 June 2010 - 06:53 AM.

[Jill]

Do you have any evidence that relying on another service/other services that are more willing to show what *they* know about backlink profiles...is worse for understanding whats going on in Google

Yes. There was a quote from the recent SMX Advanced conference by I believe Maile Ohye who works for Google. She said something about reviewing a website that on the surface appeared to have hundreds of links. But when she looked at it with her own internal Google tools, it actually had only about 3 links that they counted.

Those aren't the exact numbers but it was something like that. I'll have to to dig up the article I read it in. It may have been a live tweet from the conf.

So you can use all the backlink tools you want, but you'll never know which ones Google counts and which they don't.

[PatrickGer]

very interesting - I didnt expect to hear that, admittedly.

Does this mean you believe google's link count is better than e.g. yahoo's to understand what's going on in Google? or do you believe both simply suck and looking at either one is not even worth the few minutes it takes?

Do you remember if she said this kind of discrepancy was generally true? Or could it have been an outlier example (you never know)? Maybe 'on the surface' involves links that any SEO with experience would discount when looking at the yahoo/majestic results (e.g. 100 footer links from the same websites, forum links,etc.)?

just wondering!

[kevs]

She could be lying...

[chrishirst]

Albert Einstein:

"Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted"


And I wrote

[Jill]

Does this mean you believe google's link count is better than e.g. yahoo's to understand what's going on in Google?

Google's link count that we see? It means absolutely nothing.

Maile was talking about their own internal tools. Yahoo's link count or any other tool's link count have nothing to do with Google's internal tools and would presumably show something completely different than what Google knows about.

Google has no interest in letting us know which links they count and which they don't. Period. End of story.

I still don't get why people get so caught up in having to know it anyway.

[piskie]

Why, because it's there to check and somebody once said in an authoritative way that it was a good thing to do.

[Jill]

Oh yeah!