Bruce Clay’s LinksMap tool reviewed

I recently had the opportunity to use Bruce Clay’s LinksMap™ tool on a Web site for one of my clients.

In theory, the LinksMap tool seems like a good idea. It’s purpose is to create a non-indexed page (or pages) that lists sites that link to your site. Inbound links to your Web site from external sources can be a huge factor in improving your site’s rankings in search engines. By having a list of other sites that link to your Web site, theoretically you “help” search engines find all the sites that link to yours. And because this page of links is not indexed, it won’t show up in search engine results or affect PageRank.

Some Background on Inbound Links

To check out what sites are linking to your Web site, you can search for inbound links in each of the three main search engines. If you were seraching for all the sites that link to this web site, you would enter the following in each search engine’s respective box:
Google > link:www.qdigitalstudio.com > try it>
MSN > link:www.qdigitalstudio.com > try it>
Yahoo! > link:http://www.qdigitalstudio.com > try it >

Try this and you might be surprised at the differences you find in the results! At the time of this writing, Google showed 12 links to www.qdigitalstudio.com, Yahoo showed 157, and MSN showed 893. That’s a huge difference! Based on this information, it might seem that Yahoo and especially Google need help finding these 893 links that MSN knows about. Unfortunately, this data is highly misleading.

Google reveals few of your inbound links

Google does not show all of the links they know about for your site. In general they only show about 10% of the links they have indexed for your site. (In contrast, as demonstrated, MSN and Yahoo show a lot more.) Thus, it is impossible to know if Google has or hasn’t crawled and indexed all known links to your site.

Confusing and unattractive data

The second major flaw of the LinksMap tool is that the pages it generates are confusing to web site visitors. The pages show data with information like this for each link:

Body: — X-Body-Begin — X-User-Header — X-User-Header-End — X-TopPNI — X-TopPNI-End — X-MsgBody — X-Subject-Header-Begin — X-Subject-Header-End — X-Head-of-Message — Date: Tue, 13 Dec 2005 21:39:57..
Body Stats: Sentences: 223, Syllables/Word: 1.62, Words/Sentence: 10.45, FOG: 9.2, Flesch: 58.9, Kincaid: 7.7
MyLinks: http://www.qdigitalstudio.com/
Registrant: Internet Tools, Inc.
archive.mail-list.com/special/msg01287.html… - 21183 bytes Last Spidered: 2006/02/10

This is a LOT of extraneous data fo a web site visitor. Most of it is completely unusable. In addition, the default layout for the pages is unattractive and cryptic.

Past its prime

This tool may have once made sense as an SEO (search engine optimization) enhancement for helping Web sites improve their rankings. Now, however, it is out of date.

We still consider the golden rule for building a Web site is to design for your visitors, NOT for the search engines. If you build a great Web site with good content and a good (online and offline!) marketing strategy, you will naturally attract links, visitors, and customers.

Please get in touch with us for more information on how we can help you build your best web site! Contact Us>