Reverse Backlinks

Marketing
1

Is there any way I can track how many backlinks I have given another website? That is to say, if I have linked to someone else’s webpage, is there a means for me to know how many of these links have been crawled by Google and indexed? In other words, I want to know, if a webmaster looked at HIS/HER backlink count in their Google webmaster panel, how many links MY domain would be credited with?

I need to place a general link value on the number of backlinks I am giving someone else.

Is there an easy way to track this?

Thanks in advance for any input.

Steve

2

Let me be more specific:

Most of the links found in the back-link services are intended to provide general information about your INBOUND links not OUTBOUND link value…
I have a rotating batch of thousands of domains to which my site gives value, where attorneys pay me to be on tens of thousands of law related web-pages. I need an automated way of tracking the number of indexed back-links THEY are receiving from the constant Google/Bing crawls on my pages (average about 50,000 crawls per day). I am trying to discover a way to automate a tracking process that allows me to know who’s getting how many back-links from me… it needs to be quick and efficient (likely need to be scripted) and fully automated, probably running almost continually since certain reports go out to the clients routinely. I can easily track which pages are crawled and what attorneys were linked on these pages but I need to know within some level of assurance how these crawls are affecting my clients backlinks. Some clients report receiving 1,000’s of back-links from me (Statutes/law content is huge).

So as I am sifting thru the many ‘services’ what Im really wondering is how THEY get this information since I would likely have to script discovery thru their sites and trust their information rather than develop my own methods…

So maybe my question really ought to be: “How do these sites collect back-link information for specific domains?”

3

You can’t do this in Google Webmaster Tools, or any other on-line tool that I know of.

Howeve, since it’s you that created the links, that implies that the links are on your own sites (or sites whose content you control). So you need a way to count the number of links in your own sites’ HTML code.

If you are using a CMS, it might provide some way for you to do that sort of count. But, in any case, assuming you can open your HTML pages in a normal text editor, it should be fairly easy to count the occurrences of the link. Just count the number of times the URL of the target site appears in your code. If your text editor doesn’t have a built-in way of doing that, the chances are that it will let you do a find-and-replace, and will report the number of successful replacements. So you just need to replace the target URL with itself, and see how many replacements were actually made. Most high-end programmers’ editors will let you do that for a batch of files at the same time, without the need to open each file individually.

Alternatively, if you have a regular expression utility, such as grep, that too will give you the required count.

Now, having said all that, I wonder why you need this information. You talk about the number of links that your “domain would be credited with”. What is this “credit” that you have in mind? Are you under the impression that you will gain some sort of benefit or kudos by providing a large number of links to a given site? You might want to think about whether this information will be of any use to you before you spend any time on obtaining it.

Mike

4

I may have misunderstood you, and if so I apologise, but I have the impression that you are looking for a way to check whether Google has indexed links which you were paid to place. Google is becoming better at detecting link schemes, and will penalise those sites which it sees as breaking its terms of service:

See https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en for more information.

5

Steve,

Sorry, but I posted my reply before I saw your follow-up “Let me be more specific” post. Clearly, my suggestion for counting the links in your source code won’t apply on the scale that you are talking about.

That said, I can only echo TechnoBear’s advice. The scheme that you have described does sound suspiciously like the sort of thing that Google is stamping on right now.

Mike

6

No, no, no… Nobody is getting it :frowning:

These are not link schemes… attorneys have paid blocks with actual content that appears within pages of the statutes and codes in their states. People with legal problems are reading law and seeing relevant associated content on the page. This unique content (not spun or generated) contains proper links from law directly to related authoritative content on an attorney’s website. Google loves these links. They are legitimate authoritative links. Nothing phony about them. A potential client reading law about divorce for example can click straight thru to more information about divorce on an attorney’s website.

The clients end up with many, many backlinks from the statutes and codes pointing to relevant related content on their website.

AHREFS.com gives me perfect information showing referring domains for a given site. Unfortunately, they want a bankload for this information allowing only a few lookups per month. I\m not trying to compare competitors backlinks (what most people are using this site for). I need to check thousands of attorneys websites all over the country. There must be a way to get this information from google, how else is ahrefs.com compiling this information? Are they using their own crawlers? That mite be so, I have seen their bots from time to time. I am thinking the information at AHREF may be primarily gleemed from their own crawls…and not from Google itself.

I know the webmasters for each site can get this information from their webmaster account or analytics. I want to speak authoritatively to them about the benefits they are receiving from these links. These AREN’T the type of links that google is “stamping” out. It is exactly this action from google that makes my links so valuable. I am being approached by SEO/IT guys for larger law firms precisely BECAUSE these are good links and not manufactured link farms. SEO guys go apeshit for this because it’s a way to get link value that is not black/gray hat. The value comes because I can place them on so many pages of ACTUAL legal content in one swoop. Google considers the laws and codes of a state to be GOOD content. I’ve spent many years developing the means to publish this voluminous information in a web-relevant manner.

I already know EVERY page that is crawled. What I don’t know is which of these pages has been indexed by Google in such a way that the attorney’s website now has backlinks associated with it… (Google doesn’t necessarily index everything it crawls for reasons too numerous to go into here).

What I need is a way to verify what is on the referring subdomains page at AHREFS.com without paying them 5K a month to do it…

7

I’m still confused as to why you want this information and what you want to do with it.

Nothing personal, but it sounds like you want to be able to prove that your site will help other sites and be able to quantify the effect.

If the content (you focus on the links) you’re including in your pages “rotates” you should be able to create some sort of database scheme to keep track of how many times each was used.

I wouldn’t worry about whether or not Google finds the links, follows them, and then indexes the page it’s found. I think that as long as the page on your site is crawled and the link is “follow” it’s a given search engines will follow and index. They’re likely to find any site in time anyway even if it has no backlinks.

And I wouldn’t worry about whether or not the links influence the other sites’ PR — if that’s your interest. True many SEO ignorants think backlinks and PR are ultra important, but you wouldn’t want to propagate this misconception or take advantage of someone’s ignorance for financial gain would you?

Off Topic:

put lipstick on a pig and it’s still a pig :wink:

8

Really useful response, this really helps when deciding where to link. Many thanks for your help

9

that link has nothing to do with what I am trying to track… I am utterly frustrated with the timing as everyone assumes I’m a part of an illegal link scheme… :frowning: I don’t know how else to explain it… I have over 100,000 pages of law that Google has been indexing for over 15 years. Attorneys find true value in obtaining these backlinks as it funnels potential clients to their site…

10

Sorry, but …

Just to know the stats out of curiosity? (i.e. not important enough to pay for) To assess the current rotation schedule?

You’re putting the content and links there because you feel it will be beneficial to your site visitors. I see no need to be concerned about how the other sites fare as a result of your generosity.

11

‘not important enough to pay for?’ …
If I send business to an attorney and he gets a client that is worth paying me for sir… You are assuming my site has no commercial value… and that is your opinion, even tho you don’t know what the site is or how it operates. If you are suggesting that backlinks pointing from within relevant law directly to an attorney that handles that specific type of problem is valueless then you would be mistaken.

My clients are not buying links they are buying space to provide annotated content, that is to say valued added information displayed in-line with statutes. For the last time, this is not a link farm. Knowing what pages and the number of authoritative backlinks I have given an attorney is important information to me and my client.

I see no need to be concerned about how the other sites fare as a result of your generosity.

I see no reason for you to be concerned about it, I on the other hand… make a living connecting lawyers with clients…

12

Errmmm, the words are your own, not mine.

If it is indeed that valuable to you, then why not consider it a necessary business expense? Sure having to pay for something isn’t as good as getting it free, but sometimes we need to accept that that’s the way it is.

make a living connecting lawyers with clients

So you are running a type of referral / affiliate type service?
Could you not put a query variable on the links? eg. some-lawyers-site/index.html?ref=mysite

13

If it is indeed that valuable to you, then why not consider it a necessary business expense? Sure having to pay for something isn’t as good as getting it free, but sometimes we need to accept that that’s the way it is.

I don’t mind paying a reasonable fee but thousands per month I can’t afford/justify… I never said I had to have everything free…

So you are running a type of referral / affiliate type service? Could you not put a query variable on the links? eg. some-lawyers-site/index.html?ref=mysite

Yes. and there is a variable in my query and yes I do EXTENSIVE tracking… but that doesn’t tell me what ends up in Google’s index. I already track click thrus, that wasn’t my objective. I understand this has been a difficult topic to express as what I am doing is somewhat less common, but, nonetheless, …

I have concluded that AHREFs.com is NOT getting their information from Google but from their own crawlers… and this, in some large measure answers my question as well as the reason they can charge what they do…

Thanks for your input…

14

Thanks for your patience. I think I finally understand your concern and why I was confused.

As you get income from click throughs of course you want to ensure their existence is known.
But you don’t get income from the other sites getting indexed.

So the main important thing is to make sure that your site pages are being indexed.
If you are rotating the content (containing the referral links) faster than search engines index them this could indeed be affecting your income potential.

Can you slow down the rotation schedule to only happen after it’s been indexed?
This is assuming you have the “old” pages archived somewhere so they can still be found by users of course.

15

You present an interesting point. The answer is yes, the rotation is controllable and I know which pages have been crawled. But it gets even more complicated. Attorney’s listings/content are dynamically swapped out/in depending on the location of the visitor (no reason to show a Dallas attorney to an Austin visitor or a Califiornia attorney to a Texas resident [unless they expressly ask for that]). So to make sure all pages get indexed we have to ensure that Googlebots (which are all coming from an irrelevant location), as well as others, see all the pages. And herein lies one of the reasons I was looking for outside confirmation of the backlinking, to validate what I think I already know.

Another factor is that some listings are free/trial and have a particular expiration, they get slowly rolled out of rotation unless they opt-in. The free trial is an important marketing tool. Before their time expires we want to be able to tell them ‘Hey, you got x number of views, x number of click-thrus, and x number of bot-crawls/backlinks’.

Another reason to track outbound backlinking is that in addition to branding (impressions) and click thrus (case potential/traffic), there is also some perceived value by the attorney (real or not) to these links. Many attorneys, precisely BECAUSE of the recent emphasis by Google targeting link farms and other schemes, see value in getting authoritative backlinks from a legal reference site that has been in Google’s index for 15+ years.

We don’t charge for these links, they are simply a byproduct of the listings. Each listing contains value added content (annotations) related to the law in view. Because the listing is actual content (not just a name and address) and because it links to another authoritative legally related site (the attorney’s website) this is very Google friendly. The value added content contains anchor text (in context) with keywords related to the law being viewed as well as keywords on the targeted page of the attorney’s website.

So, the end user gets layman language about the law they are reading, and the attorney gets a funnel from a potential client with a specific problem to his/her website. Both parties get link association with original content (not a simple link list) containing carefully crafted anchor text. Our research has shown that attorneys and their SEO/IT personnel see value not only in branding, and click-thrus, but also the backlinks. Actually, I had overlooked the backlink angle altogether until recently when I was approached by an SEO professional representing several law firms. What got his attention was the backlinks that appeared in his own reports. This was cool. I didn’t have to find him, he found me. :slight_smile:

Each listing can end up on thousands of pages of law and search results. They see this as just one more reason for opting in. Really, it’s a good trade, they often get hundreds of back-links where we may only get one (or none) from them.

There may also be some small value in indirect acceleration of bot crawls on the target websites because of the large number of pages containing the target link. Our sites are crawled continually 24x7 by all the big bots.

It’s all still somewhat experimental at this point. I’ve been publishing the law as a free public service for 15+ years. When I began, the primary audience was the Texas Judiciary. But over time, with the rapid expansion of the Internet at large, the resource is now used mostly by non-lawyers with legal problems. And so we have been developing ways to use the resource to connect attorneys with clients beyond just a simple ‘legal directory’ or advertisements (which no-one pays attention to anyway).

At this point I’m pretty sure AHREF is using their own crawlers and the info there is NOT coming from Google.

If you got all the way through all this, hats off to you… :slight_smile: Sorry for the rant. Hope it helps you understand where I’m coming from. Thanks for your patience.