Jul122005How popular is your site?
Attracting eyeballs to your site can help bring you fame and glory (not to mention Google AdSense revenue, and Amazon affiliate credit.) And if you’re a Web developer, helping attract visitors to a client’s site, not only helps that client succeed, but will surely guarantee you a spot on their speed dial. The desire to drive traffic to a site is so intense, that you can find numerous books, countless Web sites, and endless ads for consultants and companies dedicated to SEO—search engine optimization.
While the intricacies of Google’s secret recipe for determining your search ranking are kept under lock and key, it’s common knowledge that the more links pointing to your site helps Google determine how “popular” your site is. Throw into the mix the “quality” of the pages linking to your site—how popular they are—and you can see that getting linked to your site, from other high-quality Web sites, will take you a long way in upping your Google page rank.
You may know that Google also lets you see the links pointing to a particular site, by simpling doing a Google search for: link:www.domainname.com; for example to see who links to this site you’d just search Google for link:www.sawmac.com. But, if this is all you do, you’re not getting the full story. For whatever reason, Google doesn’t show ALL the links; in some cases it doesn’t show very many of the links. For my site, Google says there are “about 7 links.”
For a better indicator go to Yahoo!. You can search for all links to a particular site like this: linkdomain:www.domainname.com. To make sure you don’t also include internal links between pages in the site, you can subtract that site address from the search like this: linkdomain:www.domainname.com -site:www.domainname.com, so to search for links pointing to this site, I could go to yahoo and search for this linkdomain:www.sawmac.com - site:www.sawmac.com. According to Yahoo! there are 80 pages linking to my site. A quick check shows that this isn’t completely accurate. Apparently some of the pages used to link to my site, but for whatever reason the link was removed (the nerve of them!)
At any rate, you can’t control the fates. Just go along for the ride, and make sure your sites have great content that will encourage other great sites to link to them.
Leonard Davis October 15th, 2005 at 7:25 pm
Thanks for the info, takes a lot of the questions about web site search rankings