Review: LinkMaps from Bruce Clay

LinkMaps
www.wilsonweb.com/afd/clay_linkmaps.htm
Bruce Clay, Inc.
207 West Los Angeles Avenue, Suite 277
Moorpark, CA 93021
805-517-1900, 866-517-1900
$45/quarter

The number of links to your website has a lot to do with how high your site is ranked for keywords. Knowing this, you've probably been involved in some kind of campaign to get more links to your site. But since so many pages that link to you are not indexed by one or more of the major search engines, you may not be getting full value from your links.

Using the Link Analysis Tool as a part of LinkMaps, I checked the number links to my site from three search engines and found a total of 423 distinct webpages with incoming links. The overlap was as follows:

In other words, search engine coverage of pages linking to my site was spotty at best. We have to take into consideration that Google seems to under-report incoming links, though webpages with those links may still be in their database. Nevertheless, there's lots of room for improvement.

How can you improve the situation? Post webpages that contain links pointing to your site, so that search engines can find and index the ones they are missing.

Bruce Clay's LinkMaps provides a tool to help automate and refine the process. Other link spidering tools can query various search engines for links that point to your website to build a comprehensive list of webpages, as does the Link Analysis Tool. But LinkMaps takes it another step. Once a comprehensive list is made, it spiders each webpage pointing to your site, then tests each of the webpages with several criteria:

1. Confirms that the webpage URL still exists, that is, that there is no 404 error.
2. Confirms that the page contains TITLE tags, otherwise discards it.
3. Confirms that the link to your site is still present. Many pages still shown in the search engines will no longer contain spiderable links. Things change.
4. Optionally discards redirected links that don't point directly to your webpage. These 301 error redirects are commonly used by larger database systems, but since they aren't direct links, they don't help your site's PageRank.
5. Discards links from pages that contain so many links that they might be a link farm. The default is 99 links on a webpage.
6. Discards sites that include too many links to your site. This removes some of my cross-linked sites from the lists, which makes the final list more realistic.
7. Discards links on any pages that include the word "Guestbook."

Webpage URLs that pass these tests are included in a set of compiled webpages that can be uploaded to your site. I ran this for my JesusWalk.com website, starting with 645 webpages purportedly pointing to my site. Here is LinkMap's report:

Here's a link to the first page (example) of my set of 13 LinkMaps pages on my site. http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmtp9/linkmaps_sample_page.htm

LinkMaps can be used alone, but when used with another tool in Bruce Clay's SEOToolSet, PathMaps, new links can be found. PathMaps is essentially an web analytics tool that tracks visitors to your website. PathMaps tracks each link they might come through, adding new links to the LinkMaps database, to be included on your LinkMaps pages when you next compile an updated set. You can also add new webpages to the LinkMaps database manually.

As I studied LinkMaps, several questions emerged which I directed to Bruce Clay. In my previous conversations with him I've found him to be a pretty no-hype guy. That isn't his style. So I'd take his answers about his own product seriously.

Bruce: Reciprocal linking is required for a link farm, and the NOINDEX parameter on the META robots tag keeps this page from being indexed. I use NOINDEX, FOLLOW tags on every LinkMaps page. As such it is simply food for spiders but not for indexed links since nothing on this page is indexed. I have verified this with Matt Cutts of Google.

Ralph: Each of the LinkMaps pages generated includes quite a bit of information obtained by spidering the webpage. This way it doesn't appear to be a link farm, but information-rich links.

Bruce: Anyone could (with enough energy or a competing link detection tool) find each of these links. I simply use a computer to construct a single list of identified and verified linking pages that can be spidered.

Bruce: Based upon the engine (since they each know about different pages), having them crawl the LinkMaps pages has historically more than doubled the number of recognized inbound links. One by product is that, since the spiders are somewhat different, the process will usually discover pages that no engine previously knew about. As a result we commonly rebuild the LinkMaps pages every 6 weeks or so. I emphasize that PathMaps is a very important part of link detection. We check every non-Search Engine referrer to verify that they link to you, and so we actually "discover" links that the search engines have not spidered.

Bruce: I would think it is high. If three engines each say there are 100 links to your site, you might have 100 links (congruent sets), 300 links (disjoint sets), or some number in between (overlapping sets). If you run my link tool on just one site you will see that there are a great many links in one SE that are not listed for the others. Hence we see this as overlapping sets. If they are all spidered by a search engine, and this leads to the spidering of entire sites, and those sites have other pages that also link to you, then your count can grow to exceed the original 300 pages.

But since the quality solicitation of a link is 10 to 15 minutes (identification, plea, tracking, etc.) and you get 20% to say yes, it takes an hour for one successful link. LinkMaps at $45 per quarter, if it results in just a couple of additional spidered links, has paid for itself many times over.

Bruce: In theory they will be identical. The LinkMaps pages are easily spidered. Unfortunately, the XLS file upload approach used in Google Sitemaps will only work for pages on your own website, not external pages. Submission should result in the submitted page being spidered. Likewise, crawling should result in the same pages being spidered.
 

Of course, it is possible for anyone to create and post webpages filled with links to your site obtained from other sources. What is involved is the labor of collecting, verifying, displaying, and updating. The danger is that any list could be seen as a link farm if the links don't contain enough content. What Bruce Clay's LinkMaps tool does is to cut the labor to a minimum and provide an easily updatable resource.

LinkMaps is a tool that -- if you already have a number of links to your site -- could make a substantial difference in your ranking for little additional work and not much money. It helps you get better value for the incoming links you already possess. Strongly recommended for sites with a considerable number of incoming links!

LinkMaps is one of the search engine optimization tools available from Bruce Clay, Inc., separate from his SEOToolSet. To subscribe LinkMaps is US $45/quarter. To subscribe to all the Bruce Clay SEOToolSet tools, including LinkMaps is $145/quarter.