I was helping someone with an SEO question today – they had a fairly new site and done a few posts, some articles, forum posts and blog comments and were surprised to discover that they had somehow got over 2,500 links!!!
The question they asked me was “Where did all these links come from???”
Maybe it’s happened to you too – you’re casually checking your backlinks in SEOQuake and all of a sudden it’s like “WOW! I’ve got 10 bajillion backlinks – I must be a PR-20 by now!” But then you start wondering where all those links came from…
Well, here’s how to uncover this sort of info…
1. Install SEOQuake
You MUST have this tool
2. Open your site
3. Hit the “Y! LD” button in SEOQuake (Yahoo! Links to Domain)
Yep – all those fabulous links…
4. Now hit the Y! LD button again and it will open Y! SiteExplorer and show you the links.
Look for a large number of links all from a single site.
5. Open that site and then examine the Page Source, searching for your URL – remember – we’re trying to find those links…
Chances are you’ll find something like this…
—–
<li id=”recent-comments-2″> <h2>Recent Comments</h2>
<ul id=”recentcomments”><li><a href=’http://www.<yourdomain>.com’ rel=’external nofollow’ class=’url’>
—–
Can you see it? You have scored a site-wide mention in their recent comments widget based on your blog commenting.
If it’s a rel=”nofollow” link (as shown here) then it is not helping your ranking too much anyway, though it would help you in other ways – notably with site indexing.
And besides – from Google’s perspective, a ton of links from a single site doesn’t really count for much more than 3-5 links. After a handful of links they pretty much ignore the rest anyway.
Also of interest – this massive set of links will disappear eventually – once you drop out of their recent comments – leaving you with just the original comment link. Depending on how often THEIR SITE is indexed, it may take the search engines a little while to discover that the links have all disappeared.
Hope this helps!
Steve
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Thank you Steve. Have had SEO Quake for a long time and did not know that function was available for the Yahoo Site Explorer. Have to agree with the Google take on many klinks from one site. I have about 75 .edu links from one site and worried a bit about it looking manipulated. It does not seem to have hindered it.
I do have one thing that has made a bit of trouble for me though in the form of WordPress pinging. I had the habit in the beginning of just editing over and over not realising that each time I did it was pinging. As a result the pages for my main keyword are lost way down in the Google results but the recent ones are ok as I took more care.
Once again thanks for the great tip.
Bonnie
MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer plugin might help you with over-pinging issues.
Hi Steve,
I’m reading your post just right in time:)
I had a similar situation with one of my clients. At the beginning when I checked their sites’ links there were more than 2000 and the site was quite new. After a couple of weeks the amount of links dropped to around 200. What I noticed was that many of these links were coming from 3 sites, they were not from commenting but from submitting a video to these sites.
Another thing is that this client had the privacy settings set up for blocking search engines and allowing only the site to be accessed by the normal visitors. So I also figured out that after I enabled the search engines, they crawled the links and only 200 were the right ones.
What do you think about that? Is this a case similar to the one you describe?
Greetings
Hi Justyna,
Could be. Usually the big spike and drop-off happens where you have taken some action on a large site that creates a “run-of-site” link – i.e. your link appears on many pages on that site. The simple example is a “recent comments” widget in a sidebar of a huge blog.
The other element in the mix is that link counts in Market Samurai (where I assume you are looking) come from Yahoo – so the number of links is simply however many Yahoo found. If Yahoo does a new crawl or re-indexes some sites, the link count can change.
Links will still be counted to your domain even if the pages are broken or search engines are blocked – they just won’t do you any good from an SEO perspective!
Steve