Payday loans

Categorizing Your Inbound Links

Writing by Nick Stamoulis

While it’s not fun or glamorous, it is important that site owners conduct a full link audit once a year. Depending on how long you have been engaging in link building, you might have thousands of links to sort through, but it has to be done. Digging through you link portfolio is important for several reasons. First off, it helps you identify any holes in your link building strategy. Do you have hundreds of links from blog commenting but only three local search profiles? Secondly, organizing your link portfolio will alert you to any “bad links” that are pointing to your site. A few is common, but if you are seeing hundreds of links coming from cloaked text, pornography sites, link exchanges and so forth, you might be risking a search engine penalty.

When I run a link audit on my own company (or a client’s site) I break the links down into the following categories:

AL: Article Link
An article link could come from the author’s bio of an article that you published on a 3rd party site (say as a guest blogger) or it could be a link from the body of an article itself (say your company is cited as a reference).

BC: Blog Comment
Most blogs allow readers to leave a comment with name, e-mail and URL. Your name then becomes anchor text for the URL you want.

BNL: Blog/News Link
Was your company mentioned in a blog post on a 3rd party site (like a wedding gown boutique being credited on the wedding photographer’s blog post)? Did you company get a write-up in an online newspaper or get featured in an online video feed?

BP: Business Profile
Sites like MerchantCircle, Yelp, Google Places and so forth are great places to create a local business profile. Not only do you get the link, you area also increasing your online brand presence and making it easier for potential customers to find you.

DL: Directory Link
Believe it or not, directories still have value in today’s world of SEO. Well-established directories like DMOZ help build your trust factor with the search engines.

LE: Link Exchange
These can be both bad and good. I classify links where a company is listed as a sponsor or partner as a link exchange, and these are perfectly acceptable links. Links coming from random sites in exchange for a link to theirs is not.

NA: Not Appropriate
These are links coming from pornography sites, gambling sites, non-English sites and so forth. They actually devalue your site.

O: Other
Anything that doesn’t fit neatly into any of the other categories.

PR: Press Release
Online press releases are a great place to include links because they can get picked up and redistributed by other sites. One press release with 3 or 4 links could actually end up creating several hundred incoming links.

SL: Social Link
These links come from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn (the Big 3), as well as any smaller niche sites.

VM: Video Marketing
Video descriptions are a great place to incorporate a direct link to your site.

8 Responses to “Categorizing Your Inbound Links”

  • Arsen Rabinovich says:
    July 20, 2011 at 6:37 pm

    Good, solid post! I wuld also add that when one is organizing their links, it is important to note if the link is do-follow or no-folow.

    Remember that an organic linking structure always includes some no-follow links.

    Thanks for sharing with me on G+

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    July 20, 2011 at 9:32 pm

    Thanks Arsen for reading!

    Take Care,
    Nick

  • Amelia Vargo says:
    July 21, 2011 at 1:25 pm

    Hi Nick – I second Arsen – great post. However, I have to ask you something – why don’t you record all this when you’re link building? I always do, I have a spreadsheet with a list of links I’ve built for a client over the course of a month, which details where the link is from, the anchor text, the type of link (eg article marketing vs blog commenting etc). Whether it’s follow or nofollow – what the pagerank of the linking page is… etc etc.

    I keep a running spreadsheet of all the links built over the course of a campaign, and regularly (every quarter or so) go through the list of links to note down when the link went live, if the link has been deleted, or rejected etc.

    I find this method to be really useful – if a client asks me ‘how many links have you built for me this month’ I can easily pull out my spreadsheet and tell them.

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    July 21, 2011 at 1:30 pm

    Thanks Amelia for reading and sharing your thoughts!

    Take Care,
    Nick

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    July 22, 2011 at 1:13 pm

    Also, great SEO will help build natural links that I didn’t actively have a hand in creating. You don’t know what kind of link that is until you take the time to check out the site. That is why link audits are so important. You can’t always account for every link that other people create.

  • Steven J Fromm says:
    September 21, 2011 at 3:58 pm

    Hey Nick: My question relates to DMOZ. I submitted my website to them on July 13, 2011. Do I just wait to hear or is it lost? Do I resubmit or just let the process unfold. Should I be worried?

  • Matt Carracino says:
    September 22, 2011 at 4:08 am

    Nick, thanks for another great set of tips!

    Have you thought of a short post on the most difficult part of this task – tips on take-downs of NA links that have cropped up?

    Thanks again Nick.

  • Nick Stamoulis says:
    September 22, 2011 at 2:28 pm

    Hi Steven,

    I would keep submitting your website once every other month until it goes through. Don’t give up hope, it took me a long time to get my site listed!

    Best,
    Nick

^ Back to Top ^