Comments on: Link Building Reports That Make Your Client Happy

By: Nicholas DeLuca

Nicholas DeLuca — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 16:03:04 +0000

I agree giving reports is very important but sometimes just the time to explain these detailed reports is very time consuming. I like to keep it simple, as long as your campaign is working :)

By: sitefling

sitefling — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 05:46:13 +0000

Everybody wants to increase their website’s traffic and doing backlinks is a proven way to do it though not the only way. As to reports, this is a good input though.

By: Loan Modification

Loan Modification — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:43:06 +0000

foot and mouth, thanks for the link, quite a pretty (not sure if its the right word here but its late and I am tired) and interesting link.

By: Foot In Mouth

Foot In Mouth — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:19:10 +0000

I do think that you’re right “accuracy” would be difficult- Unless you could control what “SEO factors” are displayed on your link graph.

But, this way you could compare your link building efforts, vs what’s being recognized in Google/Yahoo.

The real focus of the tool would be more for internal analysis of your efforts. Imagine if you had a site/program that recorded your site’s rankings over time, and you could compare it with the link data you’d been inputting into the system.

By: Ben McKay

Ben McKay — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:38:05 +0000

@foot in mouth disease, it wouldn’t really be too accurate. Gab’s is the best bet. You do need to consider items like the location of the link, latent semantic anlysis of this text, surrounding text to the link, domain relationship to external link’s subject, neighbourhood of that page to others (onsite and offsite)…etc…all offereng very little in categoric/definitive algorithmic answers for a tool to be created from.

Would be perfect though!

Ben McKay

By: Foot In Mouth

Foot In Mouth — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:05:38 +0000

Is there a 2.0 site, or tool out there that would help you graph your links? There’s this tool, http://www.touchgraph.com/TGGoogleBrowser.html that visualizes what it pics up, but is there one that you could add your link, and anchor text, and it would calculate the SEO value 4 u?

By: attlas

attlas — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 11:11:30 +0000

thanks…

By: Ann Smarty

Ann Smarty — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:35:53 +0000

@Gab, nah, not a guru at all, I am rather an Excel amateur but love playing with it… Will do my best to come up with some advanced Excel post in the future…

By: David Leonhardt

David Leonhardt — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 02:04:00 +0000

@Gab – You said “Also, we whitehats tend to forget that lots of low quality links can often suffice to rank a site”. To a large extent, I agree with this. In fact, earlier today I blogged on this very topic: http://www.seo-writer.com/blog/2008/11/10/you-need-sucky-links

By: Gab Goldenberg

Gab Goldenberg — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:43:35 +0000

@ David Leonhardt – You make an excellent point about clients getting upset at paying high fees for a relatively low number of quality links. If you look at my report template post, you’ll see however that one use I advocate is internal: get an idea where on the spectrum your link building lies:

lots of low quality, easy to attain links
few high quality, difficult to attain

Then you can adjust, depending on the niche and goals. Also, we whitehats tend to forget that lots of low quality links can often suffice to rank a site, and thus overrely on high quality links. Spending time on forum sigs and comment links can help.

As an aside, my excel template is only one part of the puzzle. I also include a word document with a summary of where the link building efforts were focused.

On another point, the concerns about spending lots of time on this are justified. I’ve submitted a post at Youmoz on the very topic of a tool to simplify reporting, as it happens. In the meantime, student interns can do the tedious work for $10/hour.

@Ann – I like the idea of updating the same document to show progress over time. I think that can help clients who skim reports.

Excel sorting and using different sheets is also an interesting idea. I know you’re an excel guru and would love to see more of your tips on this… I recall you making some comment about pivot tables a while back? I tried to figure those out this summer to no avail. It’d be great to get some lessons from the pro :D.