Backlinking Experiment Results - What Do You Make Of This?

[KenTheriot]

On Dec 26th (2 weeks ago), I wrote a keyword-optimized blog post as an experiment in backlinking. I then embarked on a fairly aggressive backlinking project for that post URL. This included 30 or 40 article site submissions (including manual submission to Ezine Articles and a few others) with anchor-text link pointing back to my post url, paid backlinks (blog commenting) from 3rd party linking service, links from my own 10 or so blogs (all on different IP addresses), dozens of social bookmark links, and to top it all off, I painstakingly posted links back to the post from 7 web 2.0 sites, and then linked to THOSE 7 from about 20 OTHER web 2.0 sites. After all that was done, I pinged all the RSS feeds for every page that had a feed (which had already been submitted to aggregators).

There should be hundreds of inbound links to the post page on my site. But Market Samurai and Scrapebox only register 28. And here's the strange part. Of those 28, only 3 are from external sites! The remaining 25 are from my own domain (links from other pages on my site, sitemap, category links, etc.).

The weirdest part of all of this is that the article page currently ranks #12 on Google for its chosen keyword, even though only 3 inbound links are registering.

I would be very interested in what the more experienced Warriors think of this result! Any opinions are appreciated.

Thanks!

Ken

Is this unusual?

[markowe]

It's probably a question for the SEO forum, but I would say that it can take more than a couple of weeks for backlinks to show up in the various tools. So maybe your blog post is at #13 on its own merits In which case you should be getting a boost fairly soon!

[Mikedb]

Hi,

SEO Spyglass will give you the exact links.

regards,

Mike

[LMC]

the juice is there, the tool your using is just not picking them up. Google won't show you all of them either.

[webfighter]

Yes, I read it somewhere on the Google's Webmaster resources that it never shows you all the backlinks with the "link:" operator. It just a random sample of the actual links count.

Do those tools use google or yahoo site explorer to get those counts?

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by KenTheriot

I would be very interested in what the more experienced Warriors think of this result!

With apologies to their enthusiasts, it confirms entirely my impression of gadgets like Market Samurai and Scrapebox in this regard.

I'd carry on doing what you're doing and stop checking with those, myself.

[Tom Ryan]

As others have said, many of the tools will not show the complete picture in regards to how many backlinks you have. It has only been a couple of weeks so some of them probably have not been indexed as well.

Just stay consistent in your link building efforts and you will start to see the number rise.

[kiloh]

What a minute... you have MS and scrapebox and you only created 28 links? Something is wrong there. How long did it take you to submit your articles to the 40 directories? I sure hope you're using some sort of software because you could have submitted to over 3000 directories in a matter of 2 hours at most.

I think the problem is some people don't have a real grasp on creating backlinks and thats why they're page will never get to page 1 of google. With your method above, you should have easily had over 75 backlinks.

[oneplusone]

Originally Posted by KenTheriot

On Dec 26th (2 weeks ago), I wrote a keyword-optimized blog post as an experiment in backlinking. I then embarked on a fairly aggressive backlinking project for that post URL. This included 30 or 40 article site submissions (including manual submission to Ezine Articles and a few others) with anchor-text link pointing back to my post url, paid backlinks (blog commenting) from 3rd party linking service, links from my own 10 or so blogs (all on different IP addresses), dozens of social bookmark links, and to top it all off, I painstakingly posted links back to the post from 7 web 2.0 sites, and then linked to THOSE 7 from about 20 OTHER web 2.0 sites. After all that was done, I pinged all the RSS feeds for every page that had a feed (which had already been submitted to aggregators).

There should be hundreds of inbound links to the post page on my site. But Market Samurai and Scrapebox only register 28. And here's the strange part. Of those 28, only 3 are from external sites! The remaining 25 are from my own domain (links from other pages on my site, sitemap, category links, etc.).

The weirdest part of all of this is that the article page currently ranks #12 on Google for its chosen keyword, even though only 3 inbound links are registering.

I would be very interested in what the more experienced Warriors think of this result! Any opinions are appreciated.

Thanks!

Ken

Is this unusual?

I think you're wasting your time dude, Market Samurai uses information from Google I believe.

Google deliberately don't show you all the backlinks.

According to a couple of SEO top dogs, their theory is that Google don't want anyone knowing this information to stop anyone working out their algorithm.

Matt Cutts himself has made it clear that not all the backlinks will be shown on Google, go and watch his videos on Youtube etc

He's said they don't show them to stop competitors (of your site) seeing all your backlinks.

Regardless of who is telling the truth regarding the exact reason, all the backlinks won't show up - that is clear.

But it doesn't mean they won't count, so I wouldn't waste energy looking at how many are "showing up" as it is just a guessing game.

The same goes for dofollow and nofollow links, don't waste time on this either.

Even if you don't believe they all count (they do IMO, and many at the top of the SEO game swear they do), it isn't natural to have dofollow links only.

[Alexa Smith]

Originally Posted by kiloh

you could have submitted to over 3000 directories in a matter of 2 hours at most.

And how valuable would those backlinks be? Might they just possibly, conceivably, maybe, ever-so-slightly, all be non-context-relevant backlinks on PR-0 pages some of which don't even get indexed anyway?

Originally Posted by kiloh

I think the problem is some people don't have a real grasp on creating backlinks

Indeed. "You heard it here first".

[Bingo123]

Could it be that those links haven't been indexed yet? I think if you give it a bit of time you will see them in those tools.

[KenTheriot]

Originally Posted by webfighter

Do those tools use google or yahoo site explorer to get those counts?

Both tools use Google and Yahoo. Market Samurai and Scrapebox.

Ken

[KenTheriot]

Originally Posted by markowe

It's probably a question for the SEO forum, but I would say that it can take more than a couple of weeks for backlinks to show up in the various tools. So maybe your blog post is at #13 on its own merits In which case you should be getting a boost fairly soon!

Doh! I forgot about the other forums. I'll put it there.

Thanks.

Ken

[KenTheriot]

Originally Posted by kiloh

What a minute... you have MS and scrapebox and you only created 28 links? Something is wrong there. How long did it take you to submit your articles to the 40 directories? I sure hope you're using some sort of software because you could have submitted to over 3000 directories in a matter of 2 hours at most.

I think the problem is some people don't have a real grasp on creating backlinks and thats why they're page will never get to page 1 of google. With your method above, you should have easily had over 75 backlinks.

Kiloh,

I use ArticleBot for article submissions, so that didn't take long. I also use RSSBot and SocialBot for automation. I didn't use the scrapebox spam commenting thing on this one, but I had a linking service put up a bunch of blog comments. In all, if every link was successful and was showing up, I would have well over 100 links to this page.

Ken

[DireStraits]

Originally Posted by KenTheriot

On Dec 26th (2 weeks ago), I wrote a keyword-optimized blog post as an experiment in backlinking. I then embarked on a fairly aggressive backlinking project for that post URL. This included 30 or 40 article site submissions (including manual submission to Ezine Articles and a few others) with anchor-text link pointing back to my post url, paid backlinks (blog commenting) from 3rd party linking service, links from my own 10 or so blogs (all on different IP addresses), dozens of social bookmark links, and to top it all off, I painstakingly posted links back to the post from 7 web 2.0 sites, and then linked to THOSE 7 from about 20 OTHER web 2.0 sites. After all that was done, I pinged all the RSS feeds for every page that had a feed (which had already been submitted to aggregators).

There should be hundreds of inbound links to the post page on my site. But Market Samurai and Scrapebox only register 28. And here's the strange part. Of those 28, only 3 are from external sites! The remaining 25 are from my own domain (links from other pages on my site, sitemap, category links, etc.).

The weirdest part of all of this is that the article page currently ranks #12 on Google for its chosen keyword, even though only 3 inbound links are registering.

I would be very interested in what the more experienced Warriors think of this result! Any opinions are appreciated.

Thanks!

Ken

Is this unusual?

Ken,

Market Samurai doesn't pull its "backlink data" from Google; it uses Yahoo, I believe (which is why, when you click on the numbers, it takes you to Yahoo Site Explorer).

You can run a backlink check on Google yourself by using the "link:yoururl.com" search operator, but in most cases barely anything is returned. Google is very conservative and selective about publicly revealing this data.

The most complete picture (as far as backlinks are concerned) is offered inside Google Webmaster Tools, but this is obviously private - no-one else other than you can access it. Yahoo Site Explorer generally displays far more backlink data publicly, and this is why Market Samurai (and many other keyword tools) utilises it.

However, whilst Yahoo is prepared to reveal more, they often have less to reveal, for longer, because they simply don't crawl as much of the web as Google does, nor as quickly.

So whilst your backlink-building efforts may be quickly reflected in your improved Google rankings, it may take a lot longer for them to show up in Yahoo Site Explorer (and thus Market Samurai). And many of them may never show up at Yahoo at all, even if they've been discovered and counted by Google.

There's really nothing you can do about this. Just keep building your links, and measure your progress by how much your search-engine rankings shift/improve - not by attempting to continually count your own backlinks. This is just wasted time.

[oneplusone]

Originally Posted by DireStraits

Ken,

Market Samurai doesn't pull its "backlink data" from Google; it uses Yahoo, I believe (which is why, when you click on the numbers, it takes you to Yahoo Site Explorer).

You can run a backlink check on Google yourself by using the "link:yoururl.com" search operator, but in most cases barely anything is returned. Google is very conservative and selective about publicly revealing this data.

The most complete picture (as far as backlinks are concerned) is offered inside Google Webmaster Tools, but this is obviously private - no-one else other than you can access it. Yahoo Site Explorer generally displays far more backlink data publicly, and this is why Market Samurai (and many other keyword tools) utilises it.

However, whilst Yahoo is prepared to reveal more, they often have less to reveal, for longer, because they simply don't crawl as much of the web as Google does, nor as quickly.

So whilst your backlink-building efforts may be quickly reflected in your improved Google rankings, it may take a lot longer for them to show up in Yahoo Site Explorer (and thus Market Samurai). And many of them may never show up at Yahoo at all, even if they've been discovered and counted by Google.

There's really nothing you can do about this. Just keep building your links, and measure your progress by how much your search-engine rankings shift/improve - not by attempting to continually count your own backlinks. This is just wasted time.

Interesting post, you're right about Google Webmaster Tools, Cutts says the same thing ... that it gives a far more accurate backlink count.

My personal opinion is that one shouldn't waste time trying to find out how many backlinks appear to be showing up, if my sites are progressing that is all I care about.

In other areas of marketing I work with accurate figures, which is why I refuse to waste time looking at backlink counts from tools which may or may not be accurate.

[KenTheriot]

Thanks everyone! I did a bunch of analysis today posts going back a month or more and discovered there was almost no correlation between the # of backlinks reported and the Google ranking for the target keyword. There did seem to be a better relationship between the quality of the keyword phrase and the ranking.

[craigcdz]

Originally Posted by markowe

It's probably a question for the SEO forum, but I would say that it can take more than a couple of weeks for backlinks to show up in the various tools. So maybe your blog post is at #13 on its own merits In which case you should be getting a boost fairly soon!

yes i agree. it will take time to show up the results of your back links or your back links. just wait and you will see the results.

[Devid Farah]

Hi Ken,

Backlinks often take some time to show up in the search results for various reasons.

If the sites linking to your main blog are not crawled often then you will notice that it will take a little while before those links get picked up.

However, you can be positive that eventually all of your links will show up over time.

[mattlaclear]

It's because you pinged the links for starters. Crawlers like finding links on their own. Attempting to assist them to find your links never really works out well.

[Dan B Rusu]

Did you check both www. and without www? yahoo SE will report those are different sites

[forsalecoza]

Originally Posted by webfighter

Yes, I read it somewhere on the Google's Webmaster resources that it never shows you all the backlinks with the "link:" operator. It just a random sample of the actual links count.

Do those tools use google or yahoo site explorer to get those counts?

You're right, it doesn't. But what is actually google's criteria on what links are to be shown?