Tracking External Followed Inbound Links - Are We Getting Fooled?

[scottclark]

This question is not about how to use SEOMOZ Link tools.  It's about the numbers themselves and how their fluctuations are causing confidence issues....

My client wants to track inbound followed links over time.  But as I understand it, this number will vary depending on the Linkscape crawling success (or even outages or partial crawls.)   In the past few reports, we've had wild fluctuations which have made them very nervous.

If my client wants to track inbound followed links over time, what SEOMOZ metric should we use for the most reliable progress checks?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Most SEOs don't count raw links, exactly because the numbers vary wildly no matter what index you use, and also because most of the Internet is made up of "junk" links that disappear off the link graph every few months.

It's estimated that 60% of the web disappears every year. The reason for this is that much of the web is auto-generated by bots, auto-blogs, low quality aggregators and just plain spam. You often don't see many of these links because the search engines tend to filter them out indexes like Mozscape tend to ignore them as they don't influence rankings.

That said, low quality and transient links do make their way into the various indexes, including Google's. They don't count much for rankings or traffic, and they are as likely to disappear as they are to appear.

Even if the numbers were to stabilize, raw link counts tell you nothing about the value of the links. One good link can outweigh 10,000 no value links. And 100 bad links can actually hurt you.

For this reason, it's usually better to use metrics link DomainAuthority and MozTrust to gauge link building success, as well as gains in traffic and rankings.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[scottclark]

This is a B2B client, selling services in the $20M US range.   SEO attribution can be a challenge because of the way due diligence gets conducted.

In addition to traffic, we measure several stages of the conversion funnel and do lead scoring attribution on the CRM.  But, in progress meetings, I need to discuss results of SEO groundwork between observable events such as ranking changes (they are top 5 in hyper competitive phrases with some powerful uncumbants.)

Inbound followed links seemed to be one good metric to report on.  I was using Linkscape for this but may need to change my approach.

[CuriousSeo]

I realise that this isn't quite the answer you were looking for, but perhaps trying to explain to the client that the number of inbound links isn't the best way to keep track of what you're doing?  I know that personally I used to keep track of all the links I was building but after a while I realised it was a bit pointless, the only things that I really care about are conversions (and money coming in), and then traffic and number of terms driving that traffic (I try and keep things simple).

Might make your life a bit easier if you're not reliant on a third party number to keep him happy and you can show the end result of all your work is conversions, traffic, rankings etc?

Otherwise as mentioned above, I'd take a look at Majestic to show the numbers going up.

[scottclark]

Yes thanks.  The issue is not the functionality of reporting but the numbers themselves.  +/- 2000 link variations between weekly runs is not okay and freaks out my clients.   I'm sure we have not had that much change in link numbers.

I do think I need a 2nd tool to cross reference to.  Majestic is a good one to consider.

Please, everyone keep ideas coming.

[brandonjschwartz]

Hmm... I think you can have an inbound link report run at certain intervals and emailed out. Then you can do a comparison over time. You might also look into something like MajesticSEO which has a historic backlink tool. Very helpful and very credible.