Backlink analysis and visualisation for Market Quarter and its competitors
Written by: Jonathan Briggs
June 19, 2010 [5193 views]
Today’s project has been to look at my site and competitors to see how many in-bound links each has and the quality of these backlinks. There is much written about the importance of reputation and trust for search engine rankings and I wanted to get some baseline figures for a group of sites to begin to see what sorts of effects increased numbers of links might have.
I have used http://www.linkdiagnosis.com to generate the list of links and then Apple’s numbers to show them on a stacked bar graph (above). My shop, http://www.marketquarter.com is the bottom of each chart. The more links the better but the higher the reputation carried by those links the stronger the effect on the visibility of each web site.
Good quality links are worth more than poor quality links. This presents a distinct problem for visualisation. If, as some suggest, a PageRank for 3 is 10 times as hard to get as a PageRank of 2 then I need to represent this power factor in my diagrams. But deciding on the weighting is very hard.
Here is a chart using a weighting equal to the PR+1
Here is a chart using a weighting equal to the 10 ^ PR
Notice that the order of the competitors changes depending on the power factor that I apply and this can be argued as realistic: a company that has worked on building a small number of very high quality links perhaps should be seen as "better" than one that has a large number of low quality directory entries or blog posts.
Remember that my purpose behind these visualisations is to produce diagrams that I can discuss with clients to show them the sort of effort they need to make to compete with their competitors.
The main conclusions I can draw from these diagrams is much the same whichever one I use. I need to do more reputation building to bring myself up to the same level of visibility as my most important competitors but there is still a lot for me to do.
One question I would like to try and answer for my clients is to estimate the amount of work involved to achieve the next level of PageRank; the scale of links required. This is likely to vary by subject area with highly competitive areas requiring more (and higher) quality links than subjects with fewer sites.
Update
I have been searching for some other opinions on the power factor involved and found an interesting (if rather old) post at Page Rank Calculator. Please note that as this article points out PageRank is only a rough guide to the reputation of a page or site but a useful one in helping a shop owner see the scale of the work they will need to achieve improved search engine traffic.
What is this project about?
Read the introduction to this series Site Benchmarking, testing and improvement for the MarketQuarter
I would love to hear from others who have performed similar analysis on their own shops or from anyone with questions. Add your comments below or follow @JonathanBriggs on Twitter
What do you think?
