Deep Link Ratio – Cool Tool

By Dan Thies | April 20, 2005 | Search Engine Marketing

I’ve known Jim Boykin of We Build Pages for some time now. Jim uses one of my books as training material for new members of his team, and I make constant use of the free tools this team of professionals offers on their web site.

Well, Jim’s team has done it again, with another great tool, the Deep Link Ratio Analyzer. This tool compares the links pointing in to a site, to analyze the effects of “deep links” (links to interior pages) vs. links to the site’s home page.

Thanks to SitePoint co-founder Matt Mickiewicz for the link.

Written By:

Dan Thies

Dan has been helping his clients (and friends) promote their Websites, though his company SEO Research Labs, since 1996. Dan is the author of SitePoint's The Search Engine Marketing Kit and also maintains Key Words: SitePoint's Search Engine Marketing blog.

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{ 13 comments }

SEO Professionals August 10, 2011 at 8:05 pm: DLR or deep link ratio? Well, first let us first define a deep link. Deep links are incoming back-links to any specific page within the website other than the home page. And DLR or deep link ratio is the ratio of deep-links to website root links. The total deep links divided by the total number of incoming links will give us the DLR that is expressed as a percentage.Thus a website’s DLR is just the comparison of the number of backlinks that go to pages under the top level of the website to the total number of backlinks for the entire website.” There are many free online DLR calculator tools on the web to calculate a website’s DLR and it takes justr a few seconds to get a site’s DLR.
dude June 25, 2008 at 1:52 pm: Cool i will chack it!
Thanks for the Information!
kajax101 April 30, 2005 at 12:32 pm: Totally awesome tool. Even if it be flawed in the absolute sense it’s worth its’ weight in gold when you use it comparatively.
awall19 April 26, 2005 at 2:54 pm: >OK Cool tool, but how can it help me?
it can help show you how competitive a market is and how the sites link profile looks. if almost all of their links point at the home page the site may not be well integrated into their community, or it may be more prone to ranking fluctuations.
Roger Smolski April 21, 2005 at 6:41 am: Maybe I can help since I initially developed the Deep Link Ratio.
Firstly the tool over on webuildpages does not actually calculate the Deep Link Ratio. I am not sure what formula they are using but it certainly not the correct one. The version they are using will produce anomalous results as you can see with this example: Input the search phrase ‘search engine marketing’ and observe that one result has a negative DLR which is of course mathematically impossible. I have suggested to Jim Boykin that he uses the formula contained in my original explanation here http://www.text-link-ads.co.uk/deep-link-ratio.shtml
Secondly there is absolutely no correlation between the search results and DLR in Google, MSN and Yahoo according to my research. However it is a useful tool for evaluating sites on which site-wide text links might be placed. The theory being that the higher the DLR the more traffic that will generated from site-wides, within the same sector, and in general I have found this to be the case.
Hope that helps clarify DLR.
- Roger
hotnuts21 April 21, 2005 at 5:44 am: The page posted by nerveman explains how it works, which is nice and clear. However it does not tell me what is a good DLR to have and how to use the results.
The test I ran came out with a mix of results, with no pattern to high and low DLR so didnt really seem to make any difference to the rankings. As an idea is the DLR from 1-10 8.333%, 4.918%, 4.000%, 57.377%, 0.000%, 0.000%, 24.691%, 92.553%, 98.305%, 1.905%. As you can see no real pattern.
Kadence April 21, 2005 at 1:33 am: Very interesting tool, though this ratio doesn’t seem to matter much for rankings, from what I see.
mrsmiley April 20, 2005 at 6:34 pm: Cant say reading that explaination I understand it either. To me a higher number is preferable. In some cases I can see negative DLR figures appearing for some sites. I’m assuming that is far from good.
Nerveman April 20, 2005 at 5:17 pm: They explain it here for you:
http://www.webuildpages.com/seo-tools/tool_info.php
Mike Jackson April 20, 2005 at 4:37 pm: Gotta echo hotnuts21 – what does this tell me? What is this really analyzing? Why when I enter two wildly different search terms do the results for my site come back the same? Is a 94.222% DLR good or bad?
hotnuts21 April 20, 2005 at 3:00 pm: OK Cool tool, but how can it help me? Is it good to have a high DLR or is it preferable to have a low DLR, does it actually make much difference to the rankings?
Both this blog and the sites information, doesnt point out how it can help you, now I can guess but im playing devils advocate, plenty of people wont know how this will help them! Or what they should do with the results.
bwarrene April 20, 2005 at 2:04 pm: Great link and neat tool.
someonewhois April 20, 2005 at 12:37 pm: Cool, thanks for the link!