Link Building Outside Of The BoxThe Appliance Of Link Science

With

Our Objectives

To define a scientific methodology that reduces massive lists of potential linking partners…

to actionable lists of relevant authorative sites that improve search engine rankings

Firstly – who’s got most backlink data?

Methodology

• Working with Econsultancy• We exported the backlink

information from Google Webmaster

• Then looked for commonality of linking domains against MajesticSEO & Linkscape

Commonality

Google Webmaster

Tools

MajesticSEO

Moz Linkscape

InfluenceFinder

Linkscape1,041 Domains

337 In GWM

Google Webmaster (GWM)5,189 Domains

MajesticSEO8,448 Domains

2,051 DomainsIn GWM

4,123 DomainsRefreshed & Enlarged

Sub-set Of Majestic SEO

1,681 In GWM

Learnings

Evidence suggests Google Webmaster Backlink Export does not provide all the links that Google knows

about

We will be producing more research on this as we increase the sample size

Either way, the list size is too big

Moving Beyond A Big List

Lets clean it with some science

The Science Approach

• Fresh Data– We had our bots re-index the backlink page data ensuring

it’s fresh– Our aim is to turn interesting fresh data into useful data for

link builders– We use a lot of science to filter and clean the list – here

are two techniques

Finding Blogs

• Why– Because we know that blogs are good and accessible link

targets

• How – Using Decision Trees we can detect blog presence to 94%

accuracy

Blog Decision Trees

• When our bots read site source code we use decision trees to maximize the probability of our answer to questions like ‘is this site a blog?’ being correct

• Statistical techniques like decision trees provide 94% accuracy

• Using the decision tree technique on the eConsultancy link structure…

Back To Econsultancy Data

• New smaller list• 2,723 blogs to be precise

(from 8,400 domains examined by our bots)

• But we wanted to qualify even further

• We wanted to find those who had a “heartbeat”

• So lets apply some more science

Some Of Our Heartbeat Algorithm

• Filtering sites by their publishing frequency is strong filter

• So we looked at frequency updates in the eConsultancy linking blogs

• Also filter by whether feed or natural publisher

Some Feed, Some Natural

Lapsed Bloggers Likely To Be Natural

Auto Feed Publishers & Natural High

Volume

Did the science work then?

Conclusion

• Science can turn large lists of link prospects into accurate, actionable lists.

• Better lists result in more conversations with the sites that matter

• Using our science, what took MyDeco a day, took them just an hour