I checked my url first thing this morning in the link popularity checker at marketleap and it said I had 836 links. I checked it again two hours later and it said I had 804 links. I'm a little confused, and I have a few questions for the collective. How accurate is this tool? What should I be learning from the statistics? I notice I have few links with Google/AOL or Hotbot. Also, can the number of links reported with this give you any idea of what your page rank is or should be? Here are my stats: www.bendmortgagegroup.com Total: 804 Google/AOL: 20 HotBot: 20 MSN: 591 Yahoo!/FAST/Alta Vista: 173 Thanks for the help!
You can get better information from my tool at http://chkdom.com Search the web for other mortage groups and feed the url into the tool to compare who's on the top of the search and how many links they have and who points to them.
Marketleap's link popularity tool is accurate in the sense that it faithfully displays links from Google (G), MSN (M), and Yahoo (Y). If you run the link or linkdomain command (link:www.mydomain.com or linkdomain:http://www.mydomain.com) at each search engine, you should get the same results Marketleap shows. Now, each search engine has several data centers, and these data centers don't always have exactly the same info. So if you run a link command at G, switch data centers and run it again, you may get different results. So, the results are as accurate as the results from teh search engines themselves...which is to say not very. What you should learn from these statistics is your link growth. If you are only adding content to your site, but your links are growing, that means people are naturally linking to you. Or, if you spend lots and lots of hours submitting your links, but your number of reported links is stagnant, you'll know that you're not getting much return for the work you put in. It's also a good sign of what your competition is doing (you are tracking their link popularity, right? ). As for the number of links equating to pagerank, yes...sort of. Each link to your site passes a small fraction of that pages PR on to you, so if you have 20 links from PR 8 pages, you will likely have a PR 5 or 6 page (depending on how many outbound links are on each PR 8 page). On the other hand, if each link to you is on a PR 1 or PR 0 page, you will probably only get a PR 1 or 2 out of the deal. Also, the scale is logrithmic, so while 20 links might get you a PR 2 page, a PR 3 page might take 40 links on average. It's also important to note that Google only updates their public backlinks once a month, and the backlinks they do display are but a small sampling of the actual number of backlinks they know about. As an aside, this is why I love MSN. MSN displays big numbers. People like big numbers. This is why a 250,000,000,000 byte hard drive is sold as a 250 gig hard drive. Selling it as a 232 gig drive just isn't as appealling. Pinball machines and video games are the same way. Shooting one enemy in space invaders got you what? 5 points? But shooting an enemy in any arcade game now scores 5000 points. People like big numbers. Big numbers sell.
I found another useful site--Uptime.com. Check out the "Link Popularity Checker" thread. I tried to put the address, but I can't. It won't let me. I'm very new at this. Please don't laugh. Well, yeah... go ahead and laugh.
Don;t worry about it. We all started with just one post. www.uptime.com doesn't resolve for me. Even so, there really are only 3 seach engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. All the others are either too smal to care about or use of the big three's results "supplimented" with their own. HotBot is a good example of this, but I can't think of a time I saw drastically different rankings between HotBot and Google. So long as your backlink checker hits the big three, great. One popular feature with marketleap is the historical records that show you a graph of your link growth. It may be mostly worthless, but it makes pretty pictures.
Here are my stats: Here are my most recent stats on marketleap.com: www.bendmortgagegroup.com Total: 510 Google/AOL: 6 HotBot: 20 MSN: 307 Yahoo!/FAST/Alta Vista: 177 Can someone explain to me how I lost so many links on MSN?
I'm not sure, but it looks like an update on MSN's part because I just dropped about 40% of my links on every site I maintain or monitor. Asking in the MSN forum would be the smart thing for me to do, but no one's ever accused me of being smart.
Yes MSN appears to have done or be doing an update. Plus your MSN links will jump around quite alot. Personally I find the msn count of links to be quite a bit inflated, Dont know if it is something on MSN's side of things bu they will show thousands of links, and that figure could jump around by hundreds or thousands per day. Also depends if you have submitted alot of articles, then as your old articles are removed etc etc for being duplicates. This can make your links jump around quite a bit. Brad
I never really trusted marketleap for these reasons, but like most others, it's a tool, with others, to help get an estimate on links and traffic.