Important link analysis process you must know!

Credit must go to Jonathan Leger, who has presented one of the most exciting Internet Marketing lesson in recent days.

Everyone knows and says inbound links are key to ranking high on Google but he actually shows the numbers with an unlikely tool from Yahoo.

Check out his post and watch the video.

A commenter has pointed out that Jon takes into account the quantity of links, but nothing about the quality of links.

In this respect, there is a company that tabulates a fairly impressive representation of how many external links, of certain PageRank values, are required to achieve a certain Google PageRank. This still doesn't give you a complete picture just yet.

Always remember that PageRank ranks pages, not websites. 99% probability is webmasters accumulate backlinks towards the index page, and every other page is considered secondary for one major reason and that's because the information contained therein is short-lived in its validity. I need to quote an example.

Consider this piece of news by MarketWatch which I found through Google News.

The PageRank bar for this page is greyed out not because it's banned but there are several other possible reasons:

1) This page is fairly new.

2) It's a page 5 levels deep away from the main URL. A theory goes that it is at least difficult for search engine spiders to probe 3 levels deep (but backlinks may circumvent this difficulty).

3) 'Newsy' information are always dynamic. In this sense they are not influential in a classic manner. One week from now not many readers will come back to this. The page may even be taken down.

4) Because the page's influence won't last long, you won't expect many websites to link to it...not within a short period of time.

However, the PageRank for MarketWatch.com is 7, definitely an acknowledgement to an authority online publication.

What I want to do next is to contrast the MarketWatch news page with another that's totally opposite in nature. In what way is it opposite? These web pages are not as slickly designed as business ones. The webmasters don't bother about creating tables or even change fonts (it's always Times New Roman).

But I just want to show you this page which I found straight on Google's 1st-page search result based on the phrase "how to market corporate websites".

1) It's 5 levels deep.

2) It's likely to be around for some time, enough to get a PR 2.

What baffles me is the Yahoo! Site Explorer fails to detect any external inbound links that may contribute to its PageRank. Maybe it has its PageRank passed down from other internal pages, like the index page.

Truth is I have come across such sites to know there are pages like this with PR 3 or 4. Visitors must have quoted these pages, linked to them and send even more visitors. Effectively, spiders would also take notice and come back just as often. Spiders seem to use a 'trained' schedule to learn that your page always stays up-to-date and come back to take a look.

My final question is how to get 'newsy' pages with fleeting information indexed and ranked in search engines, especially as Internet marketers we know there's always new information to come up with, and mostly this is done by blogging. For others, they accumulate pages with article directories. But not all article directories are known to incorporate RSS feeds, which is the key to getting more inlinks shown on Yahoo! Site Explorer as I found out with my own blog.

2 things you can do:

1) Like what Jonathan mentioned, check out your competitors' pages and run them through the Yahoo! Site Explorer. Look out for possible directory links. These places could be where your competitors have submitted their content. Technorati is one prevalent example. Submit your RSS feed to these places and it will be automatically published for as long as you pump your blog with new information.

2) The quicker thing to do is refer to this list of RSS directories and RSSTop55 and submit your feed. Also social-bookmark your posts for more backlinks and exposure.

That's all I have to say. I really appreciate that if not for Jonathan's presentation my brain juice would not have flowed to write this. Yahoo! Site Explorer is a crucial piece of the puzzle to discover and compare how many inbound links are needed for what search rank.