Popularity only counts if indexed!

Most sites linking to you are not indexed in all engines...

In many cases there are a significant number of web sites that link to your site. Most of these pages have never been submitted to or indexed by a search engine, thus the links they contain are not counted towards your site popularity. It is beneficial to you to let the search engines know about these pages so that you may get credit for the links.

For instance, given 5 search engines, if each engine reports that there are 100 sites linking to you, how many sites really link to you? It could be 100 and every site is in every engine, but it is more likely to be over 300 sites, where only a fraction are known to any one engine and there is little overlap. In fact, if there is NO overlap, you could have 500 sites that link to you. The problem is that all of the sites are not indexed in all of the engines. In fact, according to some studies, the amount of sites shared by two engines (let alone four or five) is only 11.1%.

Your "popularity" is being undervalued because of these "undiscovered links." More importantly, these sites are themselves not in the search engines, so they are not receiving traffic, hence they are not sending you traffic.

You need to detect, aggregate, and organise linking pages...

The LinkMaps™ process will query the search engines and extract a large list of unique page names that are indexed in at least one search engine. This list is then spidered (a very time consuming process) to validate the link to your site exists (many links change and the search engine lists appear to only be 80% accurate). Validity is not trivial, and our process is both resource and time consuming. We then sort the validated page list based upon pages found in the fewest engines and a report of the linking sites is generated. We also include a search tool so that you can investigate the linking sites by searching by keywords.

LinkMaps™ is...

LinkMap™ is a method for obtaining a report of external pages linking to your site as well as a list (as a spreadsheet) of those sites that can be used for site submission. These reports and lists facilitate the identification and indexing of these linking pages, ultimately helping to boost your traffic.

LinkMaps™ will query several major search engines, extracting a list of pages that each of the search engines think links directly to your site. We then build a single list of unique site names so that we have a list of all sites. In essence, if 5 engines each know of 100 sites, you could have only 100 links, or you could have 500 links. We simply construct a unique list based upon what any of the search engines think link to you.

Note that a link like:

http://click.hotbot.com/director.asp?id=1&target=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Ebruceclay% 2Ecom%2Fweb_rank%2Ehtm&query=search+engine+Search Engine Optimisation&rsource=LCOSWF

may actually cause the visitor to go to your page, does not count in the search engines as a direct link and you will not receive "credit" for having this link. Simply put: Such links do not contribute to the popularity of your site. This type of link is commonly found in search engine results pages and in third-party affiliate programs.

Now comes the problem. Many of the search engine entries may no longer link to you, or they may simply no longer exist. To make sure our lists are accurate, we must spider each URL provided and verify that the links are still there. If they are then we produce a "map" to these verified linking pages.

Pricing

Pricing is set at $45 per quarter. You will have login access to our server, the ability to identify unique linking pages, have them filtered by our process, and to see reports of the linking sites in a Search Engine Results Page format.

Click here to SUBSCRIBE NOW for $45 per quarter per site!

Q & A

Questions? Please ask!

Question: Do I install any LinkMaps™ content, pages, or links onto my site?

Answer: NO! Effective January 1, 2007, Version 2 of LinkMaps™ does not require you to upload, link, or otherwise have your site connected to LinkMaps™ pages. The changes made by the search engines to spider pages more effectively has been included into LinkMaps™, so you do not need to link or submit the LinkMaps™ pages to the search engines. We maintain those pages in external files and you do not have to connect to them in any way.

Question: I have many inbound links from scraper sites and do not want to link to them. Can I keep them out?

Answer: Yes, absolutely. First, your site does not link to these pages with LinkMaps™ Version 2. Second, you can still exclude domains using our exclude options. Third, scraper sites commonly have many links, and you can set the link threshold to a number sufficient to drop many of them. Fourth, NOINDEX, FOLLOW is a valid command and it is supported and will not result in any issues for the site. You are not a spammer if you are staying out of the index. LinkMaps™ has been prominent on the bruceclay.com site, certainly scraped often, and there has never been a problem. Remember, the intent is simply to publish a list of sites for the search engine to spider, it does not bypass the normal spider process.

Question: I have a great many links, but some are invalid for various reasons. What conditions do you use to eliminate "bad links?"

Answer: The identification of pages that should not be advertised to the search engines or that are otherwise invalid are:

1. Pages that are not found (404 error).
2. Pages without TITLE tags.
3. Pages that do not have at least one link to your site.
4. Pages that contain "guestbook" or "blog" in their title or URL.
5. Pages that contain 100 or more links to other sites (possible link farms).

Other links are retained within LinkMaps™. Do not forget that what we retain is only "spider food", and the search engines will still apply their own rules and filters on top of ours. Note: we can optionally retain redirection links (links to third party servers that in turn load your page) when those links are properly identified and you request that they be included.

Question: I am looking at your tools and trying to fit them into my budget. In your SEO toolkit, there is a "Link Analysis Tool." Is this the same as the tool you call "Link Maps™?" If not, what is the difference?

Answer: The identification of pages the search engines think link to you (existing links) is in both tools. LinkMaps™ ALSO includes several tools (a spider, a reporting tool, and a search option) that reports pages validated to be linking to your site.

1. Building valid maps of who is linking to you is a tedious process.
2. Validating that each page a search engine says links to you actually does is a tedious process.
3. Building a descriptive list of the pages linking to you is a tedious process.
4. Documenting which of your pages are linked to is a tedious process.

Each of these labor intensive tasks is accomplished by LinkMaps™. If you have a great many sites linking to you, LinkMaps™ is a must. If you have a few then you can perform these tasks by hand and using LinkMaps™ may only save a few hours. It then is an issue of the value of your time.